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In three final essays, Robert N. Bellah grapples with the contradictions of modernity, and seven leading thinkers respond with profound new perspectives on our present predicament.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction, by Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton
Part I. Diagnosing Modernity
1. The Modern Project in the Light of Human Evolution, by Robert N. Bellah
2. Turning Off Nature’s Thermostats: Technology, Ecology, and Deep History, by Kyle Harper
3. Thermostatlessness: The Project of Modernity and the Process of Modernization: Reflections on Robert Bellah’s Account of the Late Modern Predicament, by Hartmut Rosa
Part II. The Modern Project
4. Prologue in Heaven (or Hell) to the Modern Project, by Robert N. Bellah
5. Culture and Hope: Reflections on Bellah’s Unfinished Project, by Ana Marta González
6. Axiality and the Critique of Power, by Alan Strathern
7. Organic Social Ethic: Universalism Without Egalitarianism, by Hans Joas
Part III. The Challenge of Modernity
8. The Tillich Lecture: Paul Tillich and the Challenge of Modernity, by Robert N. Bellah
9. On the Search for “A Serious Ethical Form of Individualism”: Bellah, Tillich, and the Anthropology of Christian Individualism, by Joel Robbins
10. “Disenchantment of the World” or Fragmentation of the Sacred?, by Philip Gorski
Conclusion, by Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton
Contributors
Index
About the author
Robert N. Bellah (1927–2013) was the Elliott Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. His many books include Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (2011).
Richard Madsen is distinguished research professor and director of the UC-Fudan Center for Research on Contemporary China at the University of California, San Diego.
William M. Sullivan is senior scholar at the Center for Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College.
Ann Swidler is a professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley.
Steven M. Tipton is Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus of Sociology of Religion at Emory University and its Candler School of Theology.
Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, and Tipton are coauthors of the landmark book Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (1985).
Summary
In three final essays, Robert N. Bellah grapples with the contradictions of modernity, and seven leading thinkers respond with profound new perspectives on our present predicament.
