The Robert Bellah Reader Kindle Edition
by Robert N. Bellah (Author), Steven M. Tipton (Editor) Format: Kindle Edition
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Perhaps best known for his coauthored bestselling books Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, Robert N. Bellah is a truly visionary leader in the social study of religion. For more than four decades, he has examined the role of religion in modern and premodern societies, attempting to discern how religious meaning is formed and how it shapes ethical and political practices. The Robert Bellah Reader brings together twenty-eight of Bellah’s seminal essays. While the essays span a period of more than forty years, nearly half of them were written in the past decade, many in the past few years.
The Reader is organized around four central concerns. It seeks to place modernity in theoretical and historical perspective, drawing from major figures in social science, historical and contemporary, from Aristotle and Rousseau through Durkheim and Weber to Habermas and Mary Douglas. It takes the United States to be in some respects the type-case of modernity and in others the most atypical of modern societies, analyzing its common faith in individual freedom and democratic self-government, and its persistent paradoxes of inequality, exclusion, and empire. The Reader is also concerned to test the axiomatic modern assumption that rational cognition and moral evaluation, fact and value, are absolutely divided, arguing instead that they overlap and interact much more than conventional wisdom in the university today usually admits. Finally, it criticizes modernity’s affirmation that faith and knowledge stand even more utterly at odds, arguing instead that their overlap and interaction, obvious in every premodern society, animate the modern world as well.
Through such critical and constructive inquiry this Reader probes many of our deepest social and cultural quandaries, quandaries that put modernity itself, with all its immense achievements, at mortal risk. Through the practical self-understanding such inquiry spurs, Bellah shows how we may share responsibility for the world we have made and seek to heal it.
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Print length
565 pages
Duke University Press Books
Publication date
9 October 2006
Product description
Review
"The Robert Bellah Reader brings together in a single text a selection of the writings of a thought-provoking scholar whose writings on the social study of religion currently span 55 years and over 250 items. . . . The Robert Bellah Reader constantly provokes the reader into a reflective mode that stimulates new ways of thinking about our contemporary situation,"--Kay Adamson "Sociology"
"The Robert Bellah Reader demonstrates what a serious scholar can accomplish when he perceives a disciplinary identity as secondary to the pursuits of knowledge and of understanding one's culture and society."--Richard C. Collins "Virginia Quarterly Review"
"The Robert Bellah Reader is a gift to readers, offering a generous view of the scholar behind the ideas. We meet a wide-ranging thinker whose work addresses social science, historical social change, and what was once called 'moral philosophy.'"--D. Michael Lindsay "Commonweal"
"Bellah is truly one of today's most powerful commentators on the social, cultural and religious meaning of modernity, in America and elsewhere. . . . The Robert Bellah Reader is a collection of twenty-eight of Bellah's most stimulating essays. . . . [I]t is not the breadth of Bellah's work that is so impressive; it is rather the depth. No one can read Bellah extensively without feeling privileged to read the work of a true scholar, one who is able to combine vast learning with graceful writing."--Derek H. Davis "Journal of Law and Religion"
"I believe that Robert Bellah is one of the more incisive religious commentators we've had on the American scene in recent times. Drawing on an astounding range of literatures, he has helped us see what otherwise might not be seen. At once sociological theorist, social critic, and serious religious thinker, Bellah has blazed new trails for helping establish work in several disciplines. We are therefore extremely fortunate to have this superb collection of his work as otherwise the interconnectedness of all that Bellah has done might be lost."--Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University
"Is it true, as some claim, that the more modern a society, the weaker our sense of the sacred? Does a sense of the sacred somehow 'liquefy, ' as Habermas suggests, as society grows ever more 'rational'? In this collection of brilliant and bold meditations on the works of Durkheim, Weber, Rousseau, Goffman, and others, Robert Bellah arrives at his own nuanced answers. An important and enlightening read."--Arlie Hochschild, University of California, Berkeley
"No other scholar has had a more profound influence on my thinking than Robert Bellah. His has been a strong and challenging voice in the continuing debate about modernity's effects on America and on the human condition. Having these important essays collected in a single volume is a valuable service. My hope is that the next generation of students and scholars will savor these essays and learn from them what it means to engage in critical reflection about the deepest quandaries of our time."--Robert Wuthnow, Princeton University
"Robert Bellah is without question one of the leaders in the senior generation of sociologists of religion. He embodies informed spiritual inquiry and a mentality I would call 'expansively catholic' in the sense of 'penetrating the dimensions of being.' He also has a protestant outlook, manifesting an ability to be critical of entities and scholarly works he affirms."--Martin E. Marty, University of Chicago --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From the Back Cover
"Is it true, as some claim, that the more modern a society, the weaker our sense of the sacred? Does a sense of the sacred somehow 'liquefy,' as Habermas suggests, as society grows ever more 'rational'? In this collection of brilliant and bold meditations on the works of Durkheim, Weber, Rousseau, Goffman, and others, Robert Bellah arrives at his own nuanced answers. An important and enlightening read."--Arlie Hochschild, University of California, Berkeley --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
About the Author
Robert N. Bellah is the Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He coauthored The Good Society and Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and has sold more than 500,000 copies. His other books include Imagining Japan, The Broken Covenant, and Beyond Belief. In 2000 President Clinton awarded Bellah the National Humanities Medal.
Steven M. Tipton teaches sociology and religion at Emory University and its Candler School of Theology, where he is a Professor and Director of the Graduate Division of Religion. He is the author of Getting Saved from the Sixties and Public Pulpits (forthcoming) and a coauthor of The Good Society and Habits of the Heart.--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
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Product details
ASIN : B00EHNZHHW
Publisher : Duke University Press Books (9 October 2006)
Language : English
File size : 1263 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 565 pages
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ABOUT ROBERT N. BELLAH
Robert N. Bellah
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Robert N. Bellah was Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley.
Bellah graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College with a B.A. in social anthropology in 1950. His undergraduate honors thesis on “Apache Kinship Systems” won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize and was published by the Harvard University Press. In 1955, he received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Sociology and Far Eastern Languages and published his doctoral dissertation, Tokugawa Religion, in 1957. After two years of postdoctoral work in Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal, he began teaching at Harvard in 1957 and left 10 years later as Professor of Sociology to move to the University of California, Berkeley. From 1967 to 1997, he served as Ford Professor of Sociology.
Other works include Beyond Belief, Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, The Broken Covenant, The New Religious Consciousness, Varieties of Civil Religion, Uncivil Religion, Imagining Japan and, most recently, The Robert Bellah Reader. The latter reflects his work as a whole and the overall direction of his life in scholarship “to understand the meaning of modernity.”
Continuing concerns already developed in part in “Civil Religion in America” and The Broken Covenant, led to a book Bellah co-authored with Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven Tipton. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life published by the University of California Press in 1985. The same group wrote The Good Society, an institutional analysis of American society, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1991.
On December 20, 2000, Bellah received the United States National Humanities Medal. The citation, which President William Jefferson Clinton signed, reads:
The President of the United States of America awards this National Humanities Medal to Robert N. Bellah for his efforts to illuminate the importance of community in American society. A distinguished sociologist and educator, he has raised our awareness of the values that are at the core of our democratic institutions and of the dangers of individualism unchecked by social responsibility.
In July 2008, Bellah and Professor Hans Joas, who holds appointments in both the University of Chicago and Freiburg University in Germany, organized a conference at the Max Weber Center of the University of Erfurt on “The Axial Age and Its Consequences for Subsequent History and the Present,” attended by a distinguished group of international scholars interested in comparative history and sociology. At the conclusion of the conference, the University of Erfurt awarded Bellah an honorary degree. Harvard University Press published the proceedings of this conference as The Axial Age and Its Consequences in 2012.
In September of 2011 the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press published Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, the result of Bellah’s lifetime interest in the evolution of religion and thirteen years of work on this volume.
Preview a book about Robert Bellah by University of Padua, Italy, Sociology Professor Matteo Bortolini.
News and Articles Commenting on Robert Bellah's Passing
Comments on the Passing of Robert N. Bellah by Jeffrey C. Alexander
American Journal of Cultural Sociology, July 31, 2013
Robert Bellah, Sociologist of Religion, Dies at 86
Tricycle, July 31, 2013
In Memoriam: Robert N. Bellah
Pacific Church News [The Episcopal Diocese of California], July 31, 2013
Robert Bellah, 1927-2013
Harvard University Press | Blog, July 31, 2013
The Passing of Robert Bellah
Association for the Sociology of Religion, July 31, 2013
Robert Bellah, preeminent American sociologist of religion, dies at 86 by Yasmin Anwar,
UC Berkeley News Center, August 1, 2013
Remembering Robert Bellah by Jeff Guhin
Jeff Guhin's blog , Thursday, August 1, 2013
Robert Bellah Departs by Mark Silk,
Religion News Service, August (less)
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