Class, nation and covenant
Over the past few days, Barack Obama’s “More Perfect Union” speech has been accessed millions of times on YouTube and dissected in dozens of articles. Understandably, most of the analyses have focused...
View ArticleThe renouncers
What has become clear to me in recent years is that the old dream of progress, which used to be assumed, is being replaced in popular culture by visions of disaster, ecological catastrophe in...
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A postsecular world society?: An interview with Jürgen Habermas
The following is a short excerpt from a recent interview with Jürgen Habermas. Click here to read the interview in its entirety [pdf]. Translated by Matthias Fritsch. * * * EM: Over the last couple of...
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Politics of misrecognition
What would secularity look like if we approached it through the perhaps vague rubric of “indigenous ‘religions’”? (The diacritics will hereafter be taken as understood.) Will we ever know? Most...
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Nothing is ever lost: An interview with Robert Bellah
Both an influential scholar and a public intellectual, Robert Bellah is one of the foremost sociologists of his generation. His books and articles have set in motion lasting conversations about the...
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Where did religion come from?
The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. —Albert Einstein The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless. —Steven Weinberg When an...
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Weber for the 21st century
For almost one hundred years, all sociologists of religion have taken Max Weber’s great work on comparative religions as a primary point of departure. Whole libraries of scholarship have been produced...
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Dangerous evolutions?
Religion in Human Evolution is an immensely ambitious book on a topic only a scholar of Robert Bellah’s stature could dare to tackle. It attempts no less than to explain human biological as well as...
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State of the Species
Human beings live in virtual worlds that define what they value, what they aspire to, and what they are able to imagine. Those virtual worlds are typically shared with fellow members of a given...
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The return of the grand narrative
In a previous post, the author gives a brief summary of Bellah’s book and argues that Bellah’s approach goes beyond the reductive naturalist account of religion—ed. The subtitle of Bellah’s book, From...
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A damned good read
When I first received my copy of Religion in Human Evolution by post, the initial impression was of its sheer heft. After opening the package, I turned first, as usual, to its notes and citations. What...
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Axial axioms
The word “magisterial” in publishers’ blurbs usually means little more than “too long,” and indeed Religion in Human Evolution is very long, but it is also magisterial in many of the ways that the...
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A response to three readers
I am grateful to Mark Juergensmeyer for organizing a panel on my book at the November 2011 meetings of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), only a couple of months after publication. Given a...
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A travelogue of ideas
In a special session at the meetings of the American Academy of Religion on November 20, 2011, Robert Bellah discussed his new book, Religion in Human Evolution, with members of a distinguished panel,...
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Habits of the heart
For some scholars in the humanities and social sciences, old age is a period of abiding productivity. Upon reaching his retirement, Robert N. Bellah, the leading sociologist of religion of the last...
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