from contemporary accounts of alien abduction to Greek and Roman ideas about the way climate shapes human character. Smith never used a computer. He typed or hand-wrote all of his papers. Furthermore, he despised the telephone and thought the cell phone was "an absolute abomination." Smith died of lung cancer on December 30, 2017. He was survived by his wife Elaine, daughter Siobhan, and son Jason. After the news of Smith's death was announced, scholars of religion soon began more explicitly to reflect on the effects of his writings and work. The blog of the UK-based quarterly, Bulletin for the Study of Religion began an ongoing series of posts, from international scholars, concerning what they understood themselves to have learned from Smith. Comparison of religions Intellectually, Smith has been influenced by neo-Kantian thinkers, especially Ernst Cassirer and Émile Durkheim. He has also been influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Smith's dissertation focused on James Frazer's The Golden Bough and the method that Frazer used in the comparison of different religions. Since then much of Smith's work has focused on the problem of comparison and how best to compare data taken from societies that are very different from one another. His most influential essay on this topic is perhaps "In Comparison a Magic Dwells". Books and Selected Works The Glory, Jest and Riddle: James George Frazer and The Golden Bough, PhD thesis, Yale University 1969 (unpublished) Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions, University of Chicago Press, 1975 (paperback 1993): Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, University of Chicago Press, 1982 (paperback 1988): To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual, University of Chicago Press, 1987 (paperback 1992): “Dying and Rising Gods,” Encyclopedia of Religion (New York, 1987), 4:521-27. Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity, University of Chicago Press, 1990 (paperback 1994): The HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion (Jonathan Z. Smith, editor, William Scott Green, associate editor, with The American Academy of Religion), 1995: Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion, University of Chicago Press, 2004 On Teaching Religion: Essays by Jonathan Z. Smith (ed. Christopher Lehrich), Oxford University Press, 2012 Reading J. Z. Smith: Essays and Interview, 1999–2010 (ed. Russell T. McCutcheon and Willi Braun), Oxford University Press, 2018 References Further reading External links 1938 births 2017 deaths Haverford College alumni Yale Divinity School alumni Dartmouth College faculty University of California, Santa