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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.
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.
568 pages, Paperback
First published September 18, 2006
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About the author
Robert N. Bellah
50 books51 followersRobert 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
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
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April 10, 2025BL60 B38 2006 Memorial Library
May 10, 2015
Good collections, given it also collects several sermons...Okay, a "civil theologian!" (somehow this terms looks very Confucian to me...)
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