Robert Bellah Reader

Bellah Robert N. Bellah

Description

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.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy of religion

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 09 octobre 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822388135
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The Robert Bellah Reader

T H E Robert Bellah

R E A D E R

Edited by Robert N. Bellah and Steven M. Tipton

D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

Durham and London 2006

©  Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Times Roman with Univers display by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Contents

Preface

vii

Introduction

I

I I

I I I



C O M PA R AT I V E A N D T H E O R E T I C A L  1 Religious Evolution  2 The Five Religions of Modern Italy 3 To Kill and Survive or to Die and Become 4 Stories as Arrows: The Religious Response to Modernity 5 Max Weber and World-Denying Love 6 Durkheim and Ritual 7 Rousseau on Society and the Individual  8 The History of Habit



A M E R I C A N R E L I G I O N  9 Civil Religion in America  10 Religion and the Legitimation of the American Republic  11 The New Religious Consciousness and the Crisis of Modernity  12 The Kingdom of God in America: Language of Faith, Language of Nation, Language of Empire  13 Citizenship, Diversity, and the Search for the Common Good  14 Is There a Common American Culture? 15 Flaws in the Protestant Code: Theological Roots of American Individualism  16 The New American Empire 17 God and King 

U N I V E R S I T Y A N D S O C I E T Y  18 The Ethical Aims of Social Inquiry 19 Class Wars and Culture Wars in the University Today





Contents 20 Freedom, Coercion, and Authority 21 The True Scholar 22 Education for Justice and the Common Good

vi

I V



Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah

S O C I O LO G Y A N D T H E O LO G Y  23 On Being Catholic and American 24 Religious Pluralism and Religious Truth  25 Texts, Sacred and Profane 26 Epiphany: ‘‘Blessed Are the Poor in Spirit’’  27 Pentecost: ‘‘Beginning in the End of Times’’ 28 All Souls Day: ‘‘The Living and the Dead in Communion’’ 

Index



Preface

Although this Reader includes pieces that have appeared in various times and places, it has taken on a more coherent form than we had at first imag- ined. The introduction shows that understanding the problem of modernity in the context of the whole history of the human species is at the heart of Bellah’s scholarly preoccupations. Each section of the Reader spells out an aspect of this central concern. Part I puts modernity in theoretical and historical context, drawing from major figures in social science, historical and contemporary. Part II applies the insights of part I to the United States, in some respects the type case of modernity, in others the most atypi- cal of modern societies. Part III attacks the modern assumption that the cognitive–evaluative divide is absolute, not arguing that the cognitive and evaluative are identical but that they overlap more than modernity usually admits. Part IV criticizes modernity’s faith–knowledge divide, usually af- firmed even more fervently than the fact–value divide. Again this section does not argue for the identity of faith and knowledge but for a major over- lap between them, an overlap obvious in all premodern societies and not missing, though denied, in modernity as well. In short, this Reader at- tempts to provide resources for thinking about many of our deepest social and cultural quandaries, quandaries that put modernity itself, with all its immense achievements as well as serious defects, at risk. Many of the chapters in this book were originally given as lectures on various occasions or were invited contributions to collective volumes. The kindness of those who arranged these occasions or edited these volumes is much appreciated. The four coauthors ofHabits of the HeartandThe Good Societyread and responded to most of the chapters in the book, that is, those written in the last twenty-five years, and thereby significantly im- proved them. The most attentive readers of Bellah’s work throughout his lifetime have been his wife, Melanie Bellah, who has read everything he has written, and his friend, Eli Sagan, who has read most of it. Bellah’s work on this volume was supported in part by a grant from the John Tem- pleton Foundation. Bellah wrote the introduction to the volume and Tipton drafted the section introductions, which Bellah revised. We wish to thank Reynolds Smith of Duke University Press for invit- ing this volume and seeing it through to publication. For their generous

viii Preface support of this work we are grateful to Emory University and its Candler School of Theology, to Dean Russell E. Richey of Candler, and to Virginia Shadron and Rosemary Hynes of the Graduate School of Arts and Sci- ences. We are indebted to Fred Kim for his timely help in preparing the manuscript, and to Matthew Bersagel-Braley for his care in proofreading and indexing this book.

Introduction

This book contains a selection from my work published over the last fifty years; at first glance it appears to be quite a heterogeneous collection, in- cluding a variety of subject matter and a variety of genres, including some 1 essays whose genre is blurred. It is a collection that reflects my work and my life: my scholarship in sociological theory and in a variety of cultures and societies; my engagement, not only in the life of the university, but also in ethics, politics, and religion. To try to give in very condensed form the overall direction of my life in scholarship, which the pieces included here and those not included here in one way or another all exemplify, I can 2 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 nineteenth 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 profes- sional identity. Although I began at Harvard as an undergraduate major in the Department of Social Relations with a concentration in social anthro- pology and took my doctoral degree, also at Harvard, in sociology and Far Eastern languages with an emphasis on Japan, it was the encounter with Talcott Parsons that had the greatest influence on my professional iden- tity. It was fortunate for me that Talcott viewed sociology as including the world and its contents so that I never was taught that my discipline had tribal boundaries that it would be fearful to cross. Indeed, the Department of Social Relations, which I experienced as an undergraduate, a graduate student, and a professor, made a virtue of boundary crossing—it included social anthropology and clinical and social psychology as well as soci-

1 Steven Tipton and I, as coeditors, have decided to include only articles and chapters from edited books, so there are no excerpts from books authored or co- authored by me, almost all of which are still in print. Brackets set off footnotes, parts of footnotes, and revisions of footnotes that postdate the original publication of some pieces, and their style of documentation has been standardized to fit this volume. A bibliography of my work appears toward the end of the volume. 2 See my festschrift: Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, eds.,Meaning and Modernity: Religion, Polity, and Self(Berke- ley: University of California Press, ). My epilogue to that book is in a different way also an effort to get at my deepest and most lasting concerns.