Cambridge University Press is currently offering free access to the three essays in the review symposium on Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution from the December 2012 issue of the European Journal of Sociology.
Posts Tagged ‘Religion in Human Evolution’
March 13th, 2013
A conversation with Robert Bellah
posted by Ruth BraunsteinMargarita A. Mooney interviews Robert Bellah at Patheos.
September 4th, 2012
People make religions and religions make people
posted by John D. BoyIn How to Believe, a blog on “great works of religion and philosophy” hosted by The Guardian, Andrew Brown has been writing about Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution.
July 20th, 2012
A Conversation with Robert Bellah on Religion in Human Evolution
posted by Wei ZhuThe following video is of Robert Bellah‘s comments at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion held in San Francisco.
July 10th, 2012
Evolutionary theory and religion
posted by Candice ScharfCharles Mathewes, of The American Interest, discusses the role of religion in evolutionary theory and analyzes two publications on this topic.
July 10th, 2012
Colonialism’s religious domain
posted by Paul S. Landau
Recently I am struck by the ambiguity of the concept of the religious. Reading Linda Heuman’s review of Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution, and then turning to Bellah’s book itself, after having been reading Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies, I feel as I have before how uncertain it is that we who write about religion in history are all writing about the same thing! Bellah’s book is an attempt to factor that uncertainty into the equation, for sure. In one part of Bellah’s overall reconstruction of “axial transitions” (including the birth of monotheism), he considers three case studies, two Native American and one Aboriginal Australian, with scrupulous care. The idea is to get a picture—before the shift to the ecumenical story, when the forces of the axial age change everything—of developmentally prior, not to say primordial, religions, without adopting anything as distortive as a model or a linear theory.
April 19th, 2012
Good news from the grand narrative
posted by Manussos MarangudakisTo be asked to contribute a commentary on Professor Robert Bellah’s magnum opus is a great honor and a privilege that, in the virtual company of intellectuals of the highest caliber, manages to concentrate the mind and at the same time to fill you with despair; not least because Religion in Human Evolution stands as a measure of the distance that lies between routine, or ordinary, intellectual activity, and genuine, indeed extraordinary, intellectual achievement.
March 9th, 2012
Back to his roots
posted by Matteo BortoliniWhen writing about other people, we all should follow Pierre Bourdieu’s advice to not be too fascinated by our human subjects. This is necessary in order to escape the “biographical fallacy,” the temptation to narrate lives as if they were historically continuous and logically consistent wholes. Bourdieu is right. Our lives are a mess of disparate events, novelties and routines, strategic decisions and lapses of reason, chances and regrets, with little, if any, overall meaning. At the same time, as Robert N. Bellah writes at the beginning of his magisterial tour de force, we are narrative animals. We cannot avoid telling stories, and every story has to have a hero, a quest, and a finale. In this brief essay I recount a couple of stories about Religion in Human Evolution, reading through the lines of this fascinating work to find and highlight some of the many threads which connect it to its author’s past.
February 28th, 2012
A travelogue of ideas
posted by Mark JuergensmeyerIn 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.… Why was this event so special? It was not just the distinction of the members of the panel themselves, beginning with Bellah, arguably the country’s best known sociologist of religion and author of such seminal essays as “Civil Religion in America” and “Religious Evolution,” and groundbreaking books, including Habits of the Heart and Tokugawa Religion. Rather, the significance of the event lay in its recognition of the importance of the book’s project, a breathtaking survey of the whole sweep of the history of religiosity, which is nothing less than the history of humankind.
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