Assessment of career of Robert Bellah
Robert N. Bellah turns 80 early next year, and Duke University Press is honoring him with The Robert Bellah Reader, edited by Bellah, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, and Steven M. Tipton, a professor of sociology at Emory University. The book, just published, presents a selection of Bellah's work over the last 50 years, along with a new introductory essay he has written about his career. Long one of sociology's most influential scholars, Bellah helped revive the study of religion in his discipline; provided a way to think about "civil religion" and the sacred beliefs that Americans, regardless of their particular religious affiliation, hold about their nation; and challenged them, in the best-selling Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, written with Tipton and several colleagues, to rise above the isolation of individualism and focus on what makes them a community. As the following selection from the introduction to the reader and comments from three noted scholars indicate, Bellah's work continues to evolve, and it continues to spark interest and debate.
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Finding Meaning in the Human Experience
By Robert N. Bellah
To try to give in very condensed form the overall direction of my life in scholarship, I can say that it is an effort to understand the meaning of modernity. I would argue that the emergence of sociology itself, at the end of the 19th century, was an effort to make sense of modernity, so that it is no accident that it was in the field of sociology that I found my professional identity.
The modern society that I most needed to understand was my own, but for a long time I avoided doing so directly. Ambivalence toward the Southern California culture in which I grew up was part of what sent me to Harvard University in the first place, as different and as far away in the continental United States as I could get, and it was ambivalence about America that made me study tribal cultures as an undergraduate, and East Asian civilization as a graduate student. It seems that I could make sense of the apparently chaotic society in which I lived only from distant positions. Distance came not only from the study of dramatically different cultures, but also from theoretical abstraction, from immersion in the great minds who had founded my field and had thought most deeply about the nature of modernity.
In 1955 I accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Islamic Studies at McGill University. For two years, I immersed myself in Islamic history and religion in an institute where half of both faculty members and students were Muslims. Later, I had to give myself a crash course in things American. For me the West, and America in particular, were never the type cases against which all others were to be measured, but the problematic cases that could only be understood in the broadest comparative perspective. It was at McGill that I tried to bring all my interests together in a paper that turned out to be a first draft of what in 1964 was published as "Religious Evolution."
But why religion and why evolution? I had grown up in the milieu of mainline Protestantism since childhood, but it was not until high school that my exposure to the Hebrew prophets and their concern with social justice made a significant impression on me, sufficient that my college Marxism seemed only a more contemporary version of themes already familiar. Thus when I wrote in The Broken Covenant that "religion is the key to culture," I was only summarizing what I had learned from the classical sociological tradition. And although I wrote about "civil religion," I argued that the deep structure of American culture is Protestantism, and that the Protestant pattern of conversion and convenant, with all its secular permutations, including revolution and constitution, is the key to American culture.
But from my teachers, especially Max Weber, I knew that Protestantism is itself situated in history and unintelligible outside it. So while the abiding concern was the understanding of modernity, and most immediately, American modernity, from very early on I knew that modernity was a mere fragment of the whole, that the idea that what went before could be forgotten is a fallacy, and that only coming to terms with the whole would serve us in facing the present and the future....
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Education
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Finding Meaning in the Human Experience
By Robert N. Bellah
To try to give in very condensed form the overall direction of my life in scholarship, I can say that it is an effort to understand the meaning of modernity. I would argue that the emergence of sociology itself, at the end of the 19th century, was an effort to make sense of modernity, so that it is no accident that it was in the field of sociology that I found my professional identity.
The modern society that I most needed to understand was my own, but for a long time I avoided doing so directly. Ambivalence toward the Southern California culture in which I grew up was part of what sent me to Harvard University in the first place, as different and as far away in the continental United States as I could get, and it was ambivalence about America that made me study tribal cultures as an undergraduate, and East Asian civilization as a graduate student. It seems that I could make sense of the apparently chaotic society in which I lived only from distant positions. Distance came not only from the study of dramatically different cultures, but also from theoretical abstraction, from immersion in the great minds who had founded my field and had thought most deeply about the nature of modernity.
In 1955 I accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Islamic Studies at McGill University. For two years, I immersed myself in Islamic history and religion in an institute where half of both faculty members and students were Muslims. Later, I had to give myself a crash course in things American. For me the West, and America in particular, were never the type cases against which all others were to be measured, but the problematic cases that could only be understood in the broadest comparative perspective. It was at McGill that I tried to bring all my interests together in a paper that turned out to be a first draft of what in 1964 was published as "Religious Evolution."
But why religion and why evolution? I had grown up in the milieu of mainline Protestantism since childhood, but it was not until high school that my exposure to the Hebrew prophets and their concern with social justice made a significant impression on me, sufficient that my college Marxism seemed only a more contemporary version of themes already familiar. Thus when I wrote in The Broken Covenant that "religion is the key to culture," I was only summarizing what I had learned from the classical sociological tradition. And although I wrote about "civil religion," I argued that the deep structure of American culture is Protestantism, and that the Protestant pattern of conversion and convenant, with all its secular permutations, including revolution and constitution, is the key to American culture.
But from my teachers, especially Max Weber, I knew that Protestantism is itself situated in history and unintelligible outside it. So while the abiding concern was the understanding of modernity, and most immediately, American modernity, from very early on I knew that modernity was a mere fragment of the whole, that the idea that what went before could be forgotten is a fallacy, and that only coming to terms with the whole would serve us in facing the present and the future....