I am grateful to Mark Juergensmeyer for organizing a panel on my book at the November 2011 meetings of the…
A response to three readers
Émile Durkheim
A damned good read
When I first received my copy of Religion in Human Evolution by post, the initial impression was of its sheer…
Beyond reductive naturalism
Future histories may report that the public discourse on religion was dominated by reductive naturalism until Robert Bellah’s Religion in…
Five questions for Robert Bellah
It is a pleasure and an honor to engage a book that is truly large in ways beyond its sheer…
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…
The sounds of science
As previous posts about The New Metaphysicals have illustrated, Courtney Bender’s spiritual but not religious subjects pose a number of…
New answers to old questions
David Smilde and Matthew May’s finding that there is an “emerging strong program” in the sociology of religion is a…
The (really) strong program
Whenever there is talk about an ‘emerging strong program’ and ‘a new sociology of religion,’ we need to keep in…
Multi-religious denominationalism and American identity
Charles Taylor has argued that those of us living in North America and Europe are witnessing a shift in our…