Robert Neelly Bellah
Robert Neelly Bellah
Robert Neelly Bellahwas an American sociologist, and the Elliott Professor of Sociology, as well as Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his work related to the sociology of religion...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSociologist
Date of Birth23 February 1927
CountryUnited States of America
retirement home giving
Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves.
children home parent
However painful the process of leaving home, for parents and for children, the really frightening thing for both would be the prospect of the child never leaving home.
who-we-are faces sides
We never get to the bottom of ourselves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with others in work, love and learning...
children moving culture
Human culture, in evolutionary terms, moves from episodic, to mimetic, to mythic, to theoretic - that made all kinds of sense. To some extent, ontogeny repeats phylogeny, because children go through something like the same thing.
husband self-worth two
Women have entered the work force . . . partly to express their feelings of self-worth . . . partly because today many families would not survive without two incomes, partly because they are not at all sure their marriages will last. The day of the husband as permanent meal-ticket is over, a fact most women recognize, however they feel about "women's liberation.
narrative evolution scientist
We have to understand ourselves as a part of the narrative of evolution. And evolution never stops. The notion that human evolution at some point stopped and "history" took over is absurd, though it is widespread among various social scientists and humanists.
race special essentials
We have imagined ourselves a special creation, set apart from other humans. In the last twentieth century, we see that our povertyis as absolute as that of the poorest nations. We have attempted to deny the human condition in our quest for power after power. It would be well for us to rejoin the human race, to accept our essential poverty as a gift, and to share our material wealth with those in need.
fate israel views
We may wonder at the choice of Israel and Rome as the archetypes of the new nation, in view of the long history of suffering of the former and the decline of the latter. We may wonder that our ancestors over-looked the darker days of those earlier nations. They did not. They hoped to construct a republic on principles to sound that if we should decline in piety and public virtue we would meet the inexorable fate of nations, which are as but dust in the hands of God.
competition who-we-are morality
We have to treat others as part of who we are, rather than as a 'them' with whom we are in constant competition.
children people desire
While there are practical and sometimes moral reasons for the decomposition of the family, it coincides neither with what most people in society say they desire nor, especially in the case of children, with their best interests.
strong buddhism simple
Yet Buddhism is four hundred years older than Christianity, and if it's not a universal religion I don't know what a universal religion is. There's also a strong focus on selectionism and the notion that religion plays a functional role in the evolutionary process. But religion is dysfunctional all the time, as well as functional. It's not so simple.
practice way belief
It's clear all the way through history that practices are primary and beliefs are secondary.
hands problem cases
The problem of the universal is difficult in every case. The universal and the particular can never be separated; they always go hand in hand.
running long risk
We're [humans] running great risks of doing things that will not be good for us. The cost can be very high indeed if we reach the point where we can't adapt to our own increasingly rapid adaptations. We run the risk of early extinction. So this certainly isn't a triumphalist story, but it is trying to get at what, in the very long run, leads to the amazing creatures that we are.