The Reverend Wilfred Cantwell Smith

Religious historian Wilfred Cantwell Smith was an early and influential proponent of interfaith dialogue. An expert in oriental languages, he founded the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University and the Department of Comparative Religion at Dalhousie. He was best known for arguing that the term religion, before the seventeenth century, meant a quality of piety common among the faithful from various traditions, and that its modern definition as a set of beliefs arose from conceptual slippage.