‘The Anthem Companion to Robert Bellah’ is the first major collection of writings on the life and work of one of the foremost twentieth-century sociologists of religion. Bellah’s work was central in many fields: the sociology of Japanese religion, the relationships between sociology and the humanities, the relationship between American religion and politics, the cultures of modern individualism, and evolution and society. During an intellectual career which spanned six decades, Bellah occupied a central position within at least three major intellectual movements: structural-functionalism and modernization theory in the 1950s and the 1960s; interpretive social science, which he helped create in the early 1970s along with Clifford Geertz and Peter Berger; and the so-called Axial age revival of the late 1990s and early 2000s. More often than not, Bellah’s work was on the edge of social scientific research; his seminal work on civil religion in the early 1970s created a huge debate across disciplines which continues to this day; his co-authored book ‘Habits of the Heart’ (1985) was a bestseller and the object of sustained debate in the general public sphere; his last magnum opus ‘Religion in Human Evolution’, published at 84, was a monument to an extraordinary scholarly and intellectual career. [NP] The richness of Bellah’s work is the object of this collection of essays by top American and European scholars from the social sciences and humanities. Each essay has a double character: it introduces a single topic in an accessible and complete manner, and then presents a reflection on the viability and import of Bellah’s ideas for interpreting contemporary phenomena. Among the authors are some of Bellah’s students who became top scholars in their fields, as well as younger scholars. From a disciplinary point of view, the list includes sociologists (Gorski, Torpey, Boy, Guhin, Libeck), historians (Borovoy, Barshay) and philosophers (Tipton, Lequire) to reflect the diversity of Bellah’s work.
Tabla de materias
Notes on Contributors; Introduction: On Being a Scholar and an Intellectual, Matteo Bortolini; Part 1 MAJOR THEMES; Chapter 1 Dialogues between Area Studies and Social Thought: Robert Bellah’s Engagement with Japan, Amy Borovoy; Chapter 2 Civil Religion and Public Theology, Steven M. Tipton; Chapter 3 Out of the Deep Past: The Axial Age and Robert Bellah’s Project of Social Criticism, John D. Boy and John Torpey; Part 2 YESTERDAY AND TODAY; Chapter 4 Broken Covenant Redux? Civil Religion in Crisis, Philip Gorski; Chapter 5 Robert Bellah’s Catholic Imagination, Jeffrey Guhin; Chapter 6 Habits of the Heart Revisited: American Individualism before and after the Communitarian Moment, Eric R. Lybeck; Part 3 UNEXPECTED MASTERS; Chapter 7 Friends in History: Eric Voegelin and Robert Bellah, Peter Brickey Le Quire; Chapter 8 The Protestant Imagination: Robert Bellah, Maruyama Masao and the Study of Japanese Thought, Andrew E. Barshay; Index.
Sobre el autor
Matteo Bortolini is associate professor of sociology at the University of Padova, Italy. His main areas of research are the sociology of knowledge and sociological theory, with particular focus on intellectuals, history of disciplines, social practices and reputational processes. Bortolini’s latest publication is the coauthored book, ‘Italian Sociology 1945–2010’ (2017).