The Robert Bellah Reader

The Robert Bellah Reader

  • Auteur: Bellah, Robert N.; Tipton, Steven M.
  • Éditeur: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822338550
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822388135
  • Lieu de publication:  Durham , United States
  • Année de publication électronique: 2006
  • Mois : Octobre
  • Pages: 568
  • DDC: 306.6
  • Langue: Anglais
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.

  • Contents
  • Preface
  • Introduction
  • I COMPARATIVE AND THEORETICAL
    • 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
  • I I AMERICAN RELIGION
    • 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
  • III UNIVERSITY AND SOCIETY
    • 18 The Ethical Aims of Social Inquiry
    • 19 Class Wars and Culture Wars in the University Today
    • 20 Freedom, Coercion, and Authority
    • 21 The True Scholar
    • 22 Education for Justice and the Common Good
  • IV SOCIOLOGY AND THEOLOGY
    • 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’’
  • Bibliography of Works by Robert N. Bellah
  • Index

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