Robert N. Bellah

Robert N. Bellah is Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. He was educated at Harvard University, receiving the B.A. in 1950 and the Ph.D. in 1955. He began teaching at Harvard in 1957 and left there as Professor of Sociology in 1967 when he moved to Berkeley to become Ford Professor of Sociology. His publications include Tokugawa Religion, Beyond Belief, The Broken Covenant, The New Religious Consciousness, Varieties of Civil Religion, Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and Its Modern Interpretation, The Robert Bellah Reader, and most recently (2011) Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. In 1985 he published Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, in collaboration with Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven Tipton, and in 1991, with the same collaborators, The Good Society. In 2000 Bellah was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Clinton.