The Robert Bellah Reader

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.

Table of Contents:
Preface vii Introduction 1 I. Comparative and Theoretical 19 1. Religious Evolution 23 2. The Five Religions of Modern Italy 51 3. To Kill and Survive or to Die and Become 81 4. Stories as Arrows: The Religious Response to Modernity 107 5. Max Weber and World-Denying Love 123 6. Durkheim and Ritual 150 7 Rousseau on Society and the Individual 181 8. The History of Habit 203 II. American Religion 221 9. Civil Religion in America 225 10. Religion and the Legitimation of the American Republic 246 11. The New Religious Consciousness and the Crisis of Modernity 265 12. The Kingdom of God in America: Language of Faith, Language of Nation, Language of Empire 285 13. Citizenship, Diversity, and the Search for the Common Good 303 14. Is There a Common American Culture? 319 15. Flaws in the Protestant Code: Theological Roots of American Individualism 333 16. The New American Empire 350 17. God and King 357 III. University and Society 18. The Ethical Aims of Social Inquiry 381 19. Class Wars and Culture Wars in the University Today 402 20. Freedom, Coercion, and Authority 410 21. The True Scholar 421 22. Education for Justice and the Common Good 434 IV. Sociology and Theology 451 23. On Being Catholic and American 457 24. Religious Pluralism and Religious Truth 474 25. Texts, Sacred and Profane 490 26. Epiphany: “Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit” 504 27. Pentecost: “Beginning in the End of Times” 510 28. All Souls Day: “The Living and the Dead in Communion” 515 Bibliography of Words by Robert N. Bellah 523 Index 542

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.

Review :
"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 "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 "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