For some scholars in the humanities and social sciences, old age is a period of abiding productivity. Upon reaching his…
Habits of the heart
axial age
A travelogue of ideas
In a special session at the meetings of the American Academy of Religion on November 20, 2011, Robert Bellah discussed…
A response to three readers
I am grateful to Mark Juergensmeyer for organizing a panel on my book at the November 2011 meetings of the…
Axial axioms
The word “magisterial” in publishers’ blurbs usually means little more than “too long,” and indeed Religion in Human Evolution is…
A damned good read
When I first received my copy of Religion in Human Evolution by post, the initial impression was of its sheer…
The return of the grand narrative
The subtitle of Bellah’s book, From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, indicates that it is about religions between the…
State of the Species
Human beings live in virtual worlds that define what they value, what they aspire to, and what they are able…
Dangerous evolutions?
Religion in Human Evolution is an immensely ambitious book on a topic only a scholar of Robert Bellah’s stature could…
Weber for the 21st century
For almost one hundred years, all sociologists of religion have taken Max Weber’s great work on comparative religions as a primary point…
Where did religion come from?
When an interviewer for the Atlantic Monthly blog asked me “What prompted you to write this book?” I apparently replied,…