Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief
By
290 pp. San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco. $25 (hc).
According to George Bernard Shaw, "Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable." From his play Back to Methuselah (NY: Brentano's, 1921) . At the heart of Huston Smith's answers to the question implied in the title of his splendid new book, Why Religion Matters, is a similar conviction. At one point, he turns to English poet David Gascoyne to express the idea: Religion matters because of "the intolerable nature of human reality when devoid of all spiritual, metaphysical dimension." Why Religion Matters, p. 41 . In no less poetic terms, Smith, a theologian and author of the classic bestseller The World's Religions, puts it this way: "... the finitude of mundane existence cannot satisfy the human heart completely." There is a dimension of existence, he says, that "life reaches for in the way that the wings of birds point to the reality of air" ibid., p. 3 .
Religion—which for many people facilitates the human connection to this spiritual dimension—also matters, Smith reminds us, for profound intellectual, if not also pragmatic, reasons. That is, it matters because truth matters. "The Big Picture" is Smith's term for truth, or reality. The central focus of his book is on the two great shaping forces of history that vie for the authority to describe this Big Picture—religion and science.
