Ninian Roderick Smart was born on 6 May 1927 in Cambridge, England. A pioneer in secular religious studies, he is known for his seven-dimensional definition of religion. After serving in the British Army Intelligence Corps, he completed his studies at Oxford and began teaching in Wales in 1952. Appointed Lecturer at the University of London, he became the first H.G. Wood Professor of Theology at Birmingham in 1961. After establishing the first religious studies department in the UK at Lancaster, he became the first J.F. Rowny Professor in the Comparative Study of Religions at UC Santa Barbara in 1976.
Visiting Professor at Varanasi, Wisconsin, Princeton, Queensland, and Lampeter, he was named the Academic Senate’s Research Professor. In 2000, he was President of the American Academy of Religion and the Inter Religious Federation for World Peace. Notable works include Reasons and Faiths: An Investigation of Religious Discourse Christian and Non-Christian (1958), Philosophers and Religious Truths (1964), The Science of Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge: Some Methodological Questions (1973), and Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs (1996).