Robert N. Bellah Explained

Robert N. Bellah
Birth Name:Robert Neelly Bellah
Birth Date:23 February 1927
Birth Place:Altus, Oklahoma, U.S.
Death Place:Oakland, California, U.S.
Thesis Title:Religion and Society in Tokugawa Japan
Thesis Year:1955
School Tradition:Communitarianism
Academic Advisors:David Aberle
Discipline:Sociology
Sub Discipline:Sociology of religion
Doctoral Students:Jeffrey C. Alexander
Education:Harvard University (BA, PhD)

Robert Neelly Bellah (February 23, 1927 – July 30, 2013) was an American sociologist and the Elliott Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his work related to the sociology of religion.[1]

Education

Bellah graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1950, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in social relations with a concentration in social anthropology. His undergraduate honors thesis won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize and was later published in 1952 with the title Apache Kinship Systems.

Bellah graduated from Harvard in a joint sociology and Far East languages program. Bellah first encountered the work of Talcott Parsons as an undergraduate when his senior honors thesis advisor was David Aberle, a former student of Parsons. Parsons was specially interested in Bellah's concept of religious evolution and the concept of "civil religion". He received his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1955. His doctoral dissertation was titled Religion and Society in Tokugawa Japan and was an extension of Max Weber's Protestant ethic thesis to Japan. It was published as Tokugawa Religion in 1957.

While an undergraduate at Harvard, Bellah was a member of the Communist Party USA from 1947 to 1949[2] and a chairman of the John Reed Club, "a recognized student organization concerned with the study of Marxism".[3] During the summer of 1954, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard McGeorge Bundy, who later served as a national security adviser to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, threatened to withdraw Bellah's graduate student fellowship if he did not provide the names of his former club associates.[4] Bellah was also interrogated by the Boston office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation with the same purpose. As a result, Bellah and his family spent two years in Canada, where he was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship at the Islamic Institute in McGill University in Montreal. He returned to Harvard after McCarthyism declined due to the death of its main instigator senator Joseph McCarthy. Bellah afterwards wrote,

Career

Bellah's magnum opus, Religion in Human Evolution (2011), traces the biological and cultural origins of religion and the interplay between the two. The sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas wrote of the work: "This great book is the intellectual harvest of the rich academic life of a leading social theorist who has assimilated a vast range of biological, anthropological, and historical literature in the pursuit of a breathtaking project… In this field I do not know of an equally ambitious and comprehensive study."[5] The book won the Distinguished Book Award of the American Sociological Association's Section on Sociology of Religion.[6]

Bellah's most famous book, 'Habits of the Heart,' was published in 1985 and explored the role of religion in American society. He argued that Americans are torn between individualism and a desire for community, and that this tension is reflected in their religious beliefs.[7]

Bellah is best known for his 1985 book Habits of the Heart, which discusses how religion contributes to and detracts from America's common good, and for his studies of religious and moral issues and their connection to society. Bellah was perhaps best known for his work related to American civil religion, a term which he coined in a 1967 article that has since gained widespread attention among scholars.[8]

He served in various positions at Harvard from 1955 to 1967 when he took the position of Ford Professor of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. He spent the remainder of his career at Berkeley.[9] His views are often classified as communitarian. A full biography of Robert Bellah, "the world's most widely read sociologist of religion",[10] written by sociologist Matteo Bortolini, titled A Joyfully Serious Man. The Life of Robert Bellah, has been published by Princeton University Press in the fall of 2021.

Nomination at Princeton

In 1972 Carl Kaysen and Clifford Geertz nominated Robert Bellah as a candidate for a permanent faculty position at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS).[11] (Bellah was at the IAS as a temporary member for the academic year 1972–1973.)[12] On January 15, 1973, at an IAS faculty meeting, the IAS faculty voted against Bellah by thirteen to eight with three abstentions. All of the mathematicians and half of the historians voted against the nomination. All of the physicists voted in favor of the nomination. After the vote, Kaysen said that he intended to recommend Bellah's nomination to the IAS's trustees despite the vote. The faculty members who voted against Bellah were outraged.[11] The dispute became extremely acrimonious,[13] but in April 1973, Bellah's eldest daughter committed suicide and he, in grief, withdrew from consideration.[14]

Personal life

Bellah was born in Altus, Oklahoma, on February 23, 1927. His father was a newspaper editor and publisher who committed suicide when Bellah was three years old. His mother Lillian moved the family to Los Angeles, where she had relatives. Bellah grew up in Los Angeles and attended Los Angeles High School, where he and his future wife, Melanie Hyman, were editors of the student newspaper. They got married in 1948 after she graduated from Stanford University, and he began studying at Harvard University after serving in the US Army. Bellah's wife died in 2010.

Bellah died July 30, 2013, at an Oakland, California, hospital from complications after heart surgery. He was 86 and is survived by his daughters Jennifer Bellah Maguire and Hally Bellah-Guther; a sister, Hallie Reynolds; and five grandchildren.[8] Robert and Melanie Bellah's eldest daughter committed suicide in 1973. Their third daughter died at age 17 in 1976 in an automobile accident.[15] Raised as a Presbyterian, he converted to Episcopalianism[4] in the Anglo-Catholic tradition.[16] [17]

Works

Robert Bellah is the author, editor, co-author, or co-editor of the following books:

Awards and honors

Bellah was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967.[19] In 1996, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.[20] He received the National Humanities Medal in 2000 from President Bill Clinton, in part for "his efforts to illuminate the importance of community in American society."[21] In 2007, he received the American Academy of Religion Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion. In 2008, he received the honorary doctorate of the Max Weber Centre of the University of Erfurt.[22]

See also

References

Bibliography

Further reading

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Welcome to the Web Pages Dedicated to the Work of Robert N. Bellah . Hartford, Connecticut . Hartford Seminary . September 7, 2018.
  2. Bellah . Robert N. . 2005 . McCarthyism at Harvard . The New York Review of Books . 52 . 2 . 0028-7504 . September 7, 2018.
  3. Bellah . Robert N. . Bundy . McGeorge . McGeorge Bundy . Kerr . Clark . Clark Kerr . Cohen . Marshall . Conway . John . Doty . Paul . 5 . 1977 . 'Veritas' at Harvard: Another Exchange . The New York Review of Books . 24 . 12 . 0028-7504 . September 7, 2018.
  4. News: Fox . Margalit . Margalit Fox . August 6, 2013 . Robert Bellah, Sociologist of Religion Who Mapped the American Soul, Dies at 86 . limited . The New York Times . August 7, 2013.
  5. Web site: About Religion in Human Evolution . Harvard University Press . August 7, 2013 . April 17, 2021 . https://web.archive.org/web/20210417140156/https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674061439&content=reviews . dead .
  6. Web site: Sociology of Religion Section Award Recipients . October 3, 2011 . American Sociological Association . September 7, 2018.
  7. Web site: Robert N Bellah, sociologist of religion, dies at 86 . .
  8. News: Woo . Elaine . August 3, 2013 . Robert N. Bellah Dies at 86; UC Berkeley Sociologist . Los Angeles Times . August 27, 2013.
  9. News: Anwar . Yasmin . Robert Bellah, preeminent American sociologist of religion, dies at 86 . 12 September 2023 . Berkeley News . 2013-08-01.
  10. News: Bergman . Barry . October 26, 2006 . Of God, Justice, and Disunited States . The Berkeleyan . . University of California, Berkeley . September 7, 2018.
  11. Jones Jr., Landon Y.. February 1974. The Atlantic. Bad Days on Mount Olympus: The Big Shoot-Out in Princeton. (See pp. 44–45.)
  12. Web site: Robert N. Bellah. Institute for Advanced Study (ias.edu). December 9, 2019.
  13. Book: Historiography of Mathematics in the 19th and 20th Centuries. 9783319396491. Remmert, Volker R.. Schneider, Martina R.. Sorensen, Henrik Kragh. 2016-12-08. Birkhäuser .
  14. Book: Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel (Great Discoveries). 245. 9780393242454. Goldstein. Rebecca. 2006-02-17. W. W. Norton & Company .
  15. Book: Bortolini, Mateo. The Anthem Companion to Robert N. Bellah. 28 June 2019. Anthem Press. 978-1-78308-964-2.
  16. Web site: Coleman . John A. . August 5, 2013 . Remembering Robert N. Bellah . limited . America . New York . November 18, 2019.
  17. Bellah . Robert N. . June 2013 . A Reply to My Critics . First Things . New York . Institute on Religion and Public Life . 1047-5141 . November 18, 2019.
  18. Andre . Claire . Velasquez . Manuel . 1992 . Creating the Good Society . Issues in Ethics . 5 . 1 . Santa Clara, California . Santa Clara University . 1091-7772 . https://web.archive.org/web/20151210194006/http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v5n1/homepage.html . December 10, 2015 . May 5, 2008 . live .
  19. Book: B . http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterB.pdf . Book of Members, 1780–2010 . American Academy of Arts and Sciences . May 30, 2011.
  20. Web site: APS Member History. 2021-12-13. search.amphilsoc.org.
  21. Web site: A brief biography of Robert N. Bellah. 2021-01-31. www.robertbellah.com.
  22. Web site: "Was ist die Achsenzeit". 2022-03-22. idw-online.de/en/.

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