Religion in Human Evolution Paperback by Robert N. Bellah

Product Details

• Publisher: Belknap Press (2017-05-08)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 784 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780674975347
• Item Weight: 1020.6 grams
• Dimensions: 23.55 x 16.26 x 3.43 cm

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
An ABC Australia Best Book on Religion and Ethics of the Year
Distinguished Book Award, Sociology of Religion Section of the American Sociological Association

Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition—a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution.

“Of Bellah’s brilliance there can be no doubt. The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly…Bellah stands in the tradition of such stalwarts of the sociological imagination as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Only one word is appropriate to characterize this book’s subject as well as its substance, and that is ‘magisterial.’”
—Alan Wolfe, New York Times Book Review

“Religion in Human Evolution is a magnum opus founded on careful research and immersed in the ‘reflective judgment’ of one of our best thinkers and writers.”
—Richard L. Wood, Commonweal

About the Author

Robert N. Bellah was Elliott Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley.