Religion's place in evolution is a provocative topic to begin with. But when one of the nation's top sociologists produces over 600 pages on the matter from retirement, people tend to take special notice. Yes, that is famed social theorist Jürgen Habermas you see providing a back-cover blurb.
Robert Bellah, the author of this new book, Religion in Human Evolution, spent his career at Harvard and Berkeley as a sociologist of religion, displacing plenty of rhetorical water in the late sixties with his essay "Civil Religion in America." There, he identified a number of American symbols and principles, "biblical archetypes" and ethical values, cohering into something of a national creed. This time, the scholar's microscope is trained not on the nation's political rhetoric, but on the very heart of human religious experience.
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