Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

Robert N. Bellah

Harvard University Press, Sep 15, 2011 - Religion - 784 pages

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
An ABC Australia Best Book on Religion and Ethics of the Year
Distinguished Book Award, Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association

Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition—a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution.

“Of Bellah’s brilliance there can be no doubt. The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly...Bellah stands in the tradition of such stalwarts of the sociological imagination as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Only one word is appropriate to characterize this book’s subject as well as its substance, and that is ‘magisterial.’”
—Alan Wolfe, New York Times Book Review

“Religion in Human Evolution is a magnum opus founded on careful research and immersed in the ‘reflective judgment’ of one of our best thinkers and writers.”
—Richard L. Wood, Commonweal

Contents

• 1 Religion and Reality: 1
• 2 Religion and Evolution: 44
• The Production of Meaning: 117
• Meaning and Power: 175
• God and King: 210
• Introduction and Ancient Israel: 265
• Ancient Greece: 324
• China in the Late First Millennium BCE: 399
• Ancient India: 481
• 10 Conclusion: 567
• Notes: 609
• Index: 715

About the author

Robert N. Bellah, an American sociologist, received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1955 and teaches at the University of California at Berkeley. He is best known for his work on community and religion. Although he has written on religions in nonwestern cultures, he has focused much of his research on the notion of civil religion in the West. To Bellah, American society confronts a moral dilemma whereby communalism competes with individualism for domination. His most important book, Habits of the Heart (1985), considers the American character and the decline of community. Bellah holds that the radical split between knowledge and commitment is untenable and can result only in a stunted personal and intellectual growth. He argues for a social science guided by communal values.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
• Author: Robert N. Bellah
• Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2011
• ISBN: 0674063090, 9780674063099
• Length: 784 pages
• Subjects: History / Ancient / General; Religion / History; Social Science / Sociology of Religion