Wilfred Cantwell Smith, maintained in this vastly important work that Westerners have misperceived religious life by making "religion" into one thing. He shows the inadequacy of "religion" to capture the living, endlessly variable ways and traditions in which religious faith presents itself in the world.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith is professor Emeritus of the Comparative History of Religion, Harvard University, where he also served for nine years as Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions and then as chair of the Committee on the Study of Religion.