Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-traditional World

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Harper & Row, 1970 - Religion - 298 pages
Religion is still something of a stepchild in the American University. In some major universities there is no department devoted to this aspect of human experience. In others the department is only uncertainty institutionalized and deals with but a fraction of man's religiousness. In a few places excellent programs exist that point the way to what can be done more generally. Like so many others I have come to the field of religion from a particular discipline, in my case, sociology. But I have in recent year become increasingly impatient with the sociology of religion as an isolated perspective. To be genuinely fruitful, it seems to me, the sociology of religion must join other approaches to the actual phenomena of religion. The study of religion seems at the moment to attract a number of mavericks and wanderers in the academy and I am grateful for the opportunities I have had in pursuing it to move outside the established structures and across the usual divisions of the university.

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Contents

PART ONE THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS
1
PART TWO RELIGION IN THE MODERNIZATION PROCESS
51
Confucianism
76
Copyright

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About the author (1970)

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.

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