Robert Neelly Bellah

Last updated

Robert Neelly Bellah

Robert Neely Bellah.jpg

Bellah in 2008
Born February 23, 1927
Altus, Oklahoma
Died July 30, 2013(2013-07-30) (aged 86)
Oakland, California
Alma mater Harvard University
Occupation Sociologist
Book author
Children Jennifer Bellah Maguire
Hally Bellah-Guther
deceased Thomasin Bellah
deceased Abigail Bellah

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]

Sociology Scientific study of human society and its origins, development, organizations, and institutions

Sociology is the scientific study of society, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and culture of everyday life. It is a social science that uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order, acceptance, and change or social evolution. While some sociologists conduct research that may be applied directly to social policy and welfare, others focus primarily on refining the theoretical understanding of social processes. Subject matter ranges from the micro-sociology level of individual agency and interaction to the macro level of systems and the social structure.

University of California, Berkeley Public university in California, USA

The University of California, Berkeley is a public research university in the United States. Located in the city of Berkeley, it was founded in 1868 and serves as the flagship institution of the ten research universities affiliated with the University of California system. Berkeley has since grown to instruct over 40,000 students in approximately 350 undergraduate and graduate degree programs covering numerous disciplines.

Sociology of religion

Sociology of religion is the study of the beliefs, practices and organizational forms of religion using the tools and methods of the discipline of sociology. This objective investigation may include the use of both quantitative methods and qualitative approaches such as participant observation, interviewing, and analysis of archival, historical and documentary materials.

Contents

Education

Bellah received a BA in social anthropology from Harvard College in 1950. His undergraduate honors thesis was titled "Apache Kinship Systems," and won the Phi Beta Kappa Prize. It was later published in 1952.

Harvard University private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with about 6,700 undergraduate students and about 15,250 post graduate students. Established in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, clergyman John Harvard, Harvard is the United States' oldest institution of higher learning, and its history, influence, and wealth have made it one of the world's most prestigious universities.

He graduated from Harvard in a joint sociology and Far East languages program, with Talcott Parsons and John Pelzel as his advisors, respectively. [2] 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." They remained intellectual friends until Parsons' death in 1979. He received his PhD in 1955. His doctoral dissertation was titled Tokugawa Religion and was an extension of Weber's Protestant ethic thesis to Japan. It was published in 1957.

Talcott Parsons American sociologist

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) was an American sociologist of the classical tradition, best known for his social action theory and structural functionalism. Parsons is considered one of the most influential figures in sociology in the 20th century. After earning a PhD in economics, he served on the faculty at Harvard University from 1927 to 1929. In 1930, he was among the first professors in its new sociology department.

David Aberle anthropologist

David Friend Aberle (1918–2004) was an American born anthropologist. Aberle was born on November 23, 1918 in St. Paul Minnesota and was well renowned for his work with the American Southwestern culture of the Navaho.

While an undergraduate at Harvard, he was a member of the Communist Party USA in 1947–1949 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 FBI 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,

Communist Party USA American political party

The Communist Party USA, officially the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), is a communist party in the United States established in 1919 after a split in the Socialist Party of America.

Marxism economic and sociopolitical worldview based on the works of Karl Marx

Marxism is a method of socioeconomic analysis that views class relations and social conflict using a materialist interpretation of historical development and takes a dialectical view of social transformation. It originates from the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

McGeorge Bundy American National Security Advisor

McGeorge "Mac" Bundy was an American expert in foreign and defense policy, serving as United States National Security Advisor to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 through 1966. He was president of the Ford Foundation from 1966 through 1979. Despite his career as a foreign-policy intellectual, educator, and philanthropist, he is best remembered as one of the chief architects of the United States' escalation of the Vietnam War during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

...I know from personal experience that Harvard did some terribly wrong things during the McCarthy period and that those things have never been publicly acknowledged. At its worst it came close to psychological terror against almost defenseless individuals. ...The university and the secret police were in collusion to suppress political dissent and even to persecute dissenters who had changed their minds if they were not willing to become part of the persecution. [3]
— Robert N. Bellah

Career

Bellah's magnum opus, Religion in Human Evolution (2011), traces the biological and cultural origins of religion and the interplay between the two. 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]

Masterpiece creation that has been given much critical praise

Masterpiece, magnum opus or chef-d’œuvre in modern use is a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or to a work of outstanding creativity, skill, profundity, or workmanship. Historically, a "masterpiece" was a work of a very high standard produced to obtain membership of a guild or academy in various areas of the visual arts and crafts.

Jürgen Habermas German sociologist and philosopher

Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theories on communicative rationality and the public sphere. In 2014, Prospect readers chose Habermas as one of their favourites among the "world's leading thinkers".

Bellah is best-known [6] 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. [7] [8]

American civil religion is a sociological theory that a nonsectarian quasi-religious faith exists within the United States with sacred symbols drawn from national history. Scholars have portrayed it as a cohesive force, a common set of values that foster social and cultural integration. The very heavy emphasis on nondenominational religious themes is quite distinctively American and the theory is designed to explain this. The concept goes back to the 19th century, but in current form, the theory was developed by sociologist Robert Bellah in 1967 in his article, "Civil Religion in America". The topic soon became the major focus at religious sociology conferences and numerous articles and books were written on the subject. The debate reached its peak with the American Bicentennial celebration in 1976. There is a viewpoint that some Americans have come to see the document of the United States Constitution, along with the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights as cornerstones of a type of civic or civil religion or political religion. Political sociologist Anthony Squiers argues that these texts act as the sacred writ of the American civil religion because they are used as authoritative symbols in what he calls the politics of the sacred. The Politics of the Sacred, according to Squiers are "the attempt to define and dictate what is in accord with the civil religious sacred and what is not. It is a battle to define what can and cannot be and what should and should not be tolerated and accepted in the community, based on its relation to that which is sacred for that community."

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. His political views are often classified as communitarian. An academic biography of Robert Bellah, "the world's most widely read sociologist of religion", [9] is currently under way. [10]

Personal

Bellah was born in Altus, Oklahoma on February 23, 1927. His father was a newspaper editor and publisher and died when he was 2. His mother Lillian moved the family to Los Angeles, where she had relatives. Bellah 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 a service in the Army. Bellah's wife died in 2010.

Bellah was briefly a communist during his student years at Harvard, as he recalled in 1977 in a letter to the New York Review of Books regarding McCarthyism at the university:

Harvard's capitulation to McCarthyism is still being defended as a form of resistance to McCarthyism. An account of my experiences will, I believe, support Diamond's and not Bundy's interpretation of those years.

I was a member of the Communist Party as a Harvard undergraduate from 1947 to 1949. During that period I was mainly involved in the John Reed Club, a recognized student organization concerned with the study of Marxism. In that connection I might recount an incident that indicates that a difference between a public policy and a private policy at Harvard such as Diamond has suggested may already have begun in 1949. According to Lipset:

In 1949, the John Reed Club sponsored a talk by a well-known Communist, Gerhart Eisler, who was on his way to a job in East Germany after having been convicted for contempt of Congress. When the University was attacked for allowing students to be corrupted, Wilbur Bender, then Dean of Harvard College, defended the students' right to hear, stating: "If Harvard students can be corrupted by an Eisler, Harvard College had better shut down as an educational institution...[p. 182]"
I was, I believe, chairman of the John Reed Club at the time and was informed shortly after we announced that Eisler would speak that the university was considering forbidding the meeting and that the chairman and executive committee of the Club were asked to meet with an administrative officer. The administrator told us in the strongest terms that the invitation was extremely embarrassing for Harvard and asked us for the good of the school to withdraw the invitation. When we stood fast he told us that quite probably none of us would ever get jobs if we persisted in our course of action. The Harvard administration was attempting to do privately and indirectly what it would not do publicly and brazenly, namely suppress freedom of speech, which was precisely the aim of McCarthy.

Bellah was fluent in Japanese and literate in Chinese, French and German, and later studied Arabic at McGill University in Montreal.

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. [11] Raised as a Presbyterian, he converted to Episcopalianism. [4]

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. [13] 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." In 2007, he received the American Academy of Religion Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion. [1]

See also

Related Research Articles

Émile Durkheim French sociologist (1858-1917)

David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and—with W. E. B. Du Bois, Karl Marx and Max Weber—is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science.

Civil religion, also referred to as a civic religion, is the implicit religious values of a nation, as expressed through public rituals, symbols, and ceremonies on sacred days and at sacred places. It is distinct from churches, although church officials and ceremonies are sometimes incorporated into the practice of civil religion. Countries described as having a civil religion include France, South Korea, and the former Soviet Union. As a concept, it originated in French political thought and became a major topic for U.S. sociologists since its use by Robert Bellah in 1960.

Robert K. Merton American sociologist

Robert King Merton was an American sociologist. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor. In 1994 he was awarded the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the field and for having founded the sociology of science. He is considered a founding father of modern sociology while also gaining a status for the work he contributed to criminology.

Charles Taylor (philosopher) Canadian philosopher

Charles Margrave Taylor is a Canadian philosopher from Montreal, Quebec, and professor emeritus at McGill University best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, the history of philosophy, and intellectual history. This work has earned him the Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize.

Randall Collins is an American sociologist who has been influential in both his teaching and writing. He has taught in many notable universities around the world and his academic works have been translated into various languages. Collins is currently Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a leading contemporary social theorist whose areas of expertise include the macro-historical sociology of political and economic change; micro-sociology, including face-to-face interaction; and the sociology of intellectuals and social conflict. He is considered to be one of the leading non-Marxist conflict theorists in the United States, and served as the president of the American Sociological Association from 2010 to 2011.

Robert J. Wuthnow is an American sociologist who is widely known for his work in the sociology of religion. He is the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, where he is also the former Chair of the Department of Sociology and Director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion.

Leo Kuper was a South African sociologist specialising in the study of genocide.

Ronald Stuart Burt is an American sociologist and the Hobart W. Williams Professor of Sociology and Strategy at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He is most notable for his research and writing on social networks and social capital, particularly the concept of structural holes in a social network.

Lifestyle enclave is a sociological term first used by Robert N. Bellah et al. in their 1985 book, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. In the glossary of the book, they provide the following definition: "A lifestyle enclave is formed by people who share some feature of private life. Members of a lifestyle enclave express their identity through shared patterns of appearance, consumption, and leisure activities, which often serve to differentiate them sharply from those with other lifestyles." This term is contrasted with community, which Bellah et al. claim is characterized by social interdependence, shared history, and shared participation in politics.

Evelyn Nakano Glenn is a Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her teaching and research responsibilities she serves as Founding Director of the University's Center for Race and Gender (CRG). The CRG is a leading U.S. academic center for the study of intersectionality among gender, race and class social groups and institutions. In June 2008 Prof. Glenn was elected President of the 15,000 member American Sociological Association. She served as President-elect during the 2008-2009 academic year, assumed her presidency at the annual ASA national convention in San Francisco in August 2009, served as President of the Association during the 2009-2010 year, and continued to serve on the ASA governing Council as Past-president until August 2011. Her Presidential Address, given at the 2010 meetings in Atlanta, was entitled "Constructing Citizenship: Exclusion, Subordination, and Resistance," and was printed as the lead article in the American Sociological Review.

Jeffrey Charles Alexander is an American sociologist, and one of the world's leading social theorists. He is the founding figure in the contemporary school of cultural sociology referred to as the "strong program".

Dick Anthony is a forensic psychologist noted for his writings on the validity of brainwashing as a determiner of behavior, a prolific researcher of the social and psychological aspects of involvement in new religious movements.

Chai-Sik Chung is an American social ethicist and sociologist of religion. He studied under Walter George Muelder at the Boston University School of Theology, where he served as the Walter G. Muelder Professor of Social Ethics from 1990 to 2011. He also studied under the late Robert N. Bellah at Harvard Divinity School with whom he had been long associated. As a scholar of comparative religious ethics, he has been a pioneer in the study of social and ethical problems arising from East Asia’s modern transformation. He has published widely in both Korean and English, on social and ethical issues involving globalization and encounters between civilizations, particularly those between Korea, East Asian religious traditions and Christianity. His publications include A Korean Confucian Encounter with the Modern World; Korea, Religious Tradition, and Globalization; Consciousness and History: Korean Cultural Tradition and Social Change; Korean Religion and Society Under Challenge: Continuity and Change; The Clash between Korean Confucianism and Modern Western Civilization; and his culminating work The Korean Tradition of Religion, Society, and Ethics: A Comparative Historical Interpretation and Looking Beyond.

Sheilaism is a shorthand term for an individual's system of religious belief which co-opts strands of multiple religions chosen by the individual usually without much theological consideration. The term derives from a woman named Sheila Larson, who is quoted by Robert N. Bellah et al. in their book Habits of the Heart as following her own "little voice" in a faith she calls "Sheilaism".

Philip Stephen Gorski is an American sociologist, interested in both the sociology of religion and historical sociology.

Ann Swidler is an American sociologist and Professor of Sociology at University of California-Berkeley. Swidler is most commonly known as a cultural sociologist and authored one of the most-cited articles in sociology, Culture in action: Symbols and strategies.

Neil Louis Gross is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology and chair of the department of sociology at Colby College. He is also a visiting scholar of New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge. He has written several books on sociological and political topics, and also blogs for The Chronicle of Higher Education. Gross edited the American Sociological Association's journal Sociological Theory from 2009 to 2015. He previously taught at the University of Southern California, Harvard University, Princeton University, and at the University of British Columbia.

John Christopher Torpey is an American academic, sociologist, and historian best known for his scholarship on the state, identity, and contemporary politics. Torpey is currently a professor of sociology and history at the Graduate Center, CUNY and director of the Graduate Center's Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. From 2016 to 2017, Torpey served as the president of the Eastern Sociological Society.

References

  1. 1 2 Robert Bellah's profile at Hartford Institute for Religion Research
  2. ↑ "Before Civil Religion. On Robert N. Bellah's Forgotten Encounters with America, 1955-1965". www.academia.edu. Retrieved 2016-04-06.
  3. 1 2 Bellah, Robert (July 14, 1977). "To the Editors". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved August 7, 2013.
  4. 1 2 Fox, Margalit (August 6, 2013). "Robert Bellah, Sociologist of Religion Who Mapped the American Soul, Dies at 86". The New York Times. Retrieved August 7, 2013.
  5. ↑ "About Religion in Human Evolution". Harvard University Press. Retrieved August 7, 2013.
  6. ↑ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=robert+bellah&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C7&as_sdtp=
  7. ↑ Bellah, Robert Neelly (Winter 1967). "Civil Religion in America". Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 96 (1): 1–21. Archived from the original on March 6, 2005. From the issue entitled Religion in America.
  8. ↑ Woo, Elaine (August 3, 2013). "Robert N. Bellah dies at 86; UC Berkeley sociologist". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved August 27, 2013.
  9. ↑ "Of God, justice, and disunited states". The Berkeleyan. UC Berkeley NewsCenter. October 26, 2006. Retrieved August 7, 2013.
  10. ↑ Bortolini, Matteo (2012). "The trap of intellectual success. Robert N. Bellah, the American civil religion debate, and the sociology of knowledge". Theory & Society. 41 (2): 187–210. doi:10.1007/s11186-012-9166-8.; Bortolini, Matteo (2011). "The "Bellah Affair" at Princeton. Scholarly excellence and academic freedom in America in the 1970s". The American Sociologist. 42 (1): 3–33. doi:10.1007/s12108-011-9120-7.; Bortolini, Matteo (2011). "Before civil religion. On Robert Bellah's forgotten encounters with America, 1955–1965". Sociologica. 4 (3).
  11. ↑ "Robert N. Bellah dies at 86; UC Berkeley sociologist". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved August 5, 2013.
  12. ↑ Andre, Claire; Manuel Velasquez. "Creating the Good Society". Santa Clara University. Retrieved May 5, 2008. "The social problems confronting us today, the authors argue, are largely the result of failures of our institutions, and our response, largely the result of our failure to realize the degree to which our lives are shaped by institutional forces and the degree to which we, as a democratic society, can shape these forces for the better."
  13. ↑ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved May 30, 2011.

See also

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.