Huston Smith

In Restoration — God’s Call To The 21st Century, Huston Smith is introduced as “a well-known scholar of religion” and quoted to define the relativist camp in the book’s discussion of religious truth claims. His mountain-climbing metaphor frames the relativist view: “It is possible to climb life’s mountain from any side, but when the top is reached the trails converge.” At the base — in “the foothills of theology, ritual, and organizational structure” — the religions are distinct, differences that add richness, “but beyond these differences, the same goal beckons.” Patrick Q Mason uses the quote to stake out one pole (relativism / many paths) against exclusivism (one legitimate path to one absolute truth) as he works through what it means for Latter-day Saints to make strong truth claims as a global minority.

Context: Huston Smith (1919–2016) was an American religious-studies scholar best known for The World’s Religions (originally The Religions of Man), a widely used comparative-religion text sympathetic to the perennialist view that the major faiths share a common ultimate truth.

Where this appears

• Restoration — God’s Call To The 21st Century — quoted for the mountain-climbing metaphor that defines the book’s “relativist” camp on religious truth.