To fully understand the part a religion plays in the life of an individual or a community, I would suggest that we need to examine it from several different points of view, only some of which can be addressed by observing a visible religious activity. Using Ninian Smart's 'dimensional model' as a starting point, we can examine the different dimensions of a religion and discover how much insight into each of them the observation of …showed first 75 words of 1200 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1200 total…part a religion plays in the life of an individual or community, and some would argue that even Ninian Smart's dimensional model offers us a less than complete picture. Still, it seems clear that to gain any kind of understanding of the part a religion plays in the life of an individual or a community we need to take a much broader view than that offered by the observation of a visible religious activity alone.