Religion and the Social Sciences Unit
Theme: A Joyfully Serious Man: The Life of Robert Bellah (Princeton University Press, 2021): A Conversation with Author, Matteo Bortolini
Monday, 3:00 PM – 4:30 PM (In Person)
Embassy Suites-Crystal B (Third Level)
Harlan Stelmach, Dominican University of California, Presiding
The recent publication of Bellah’s biography provides the AAR with a window into the scientific study of religious life from the early 1950’s when Bellah was student of Talcott Parsons at Harvard through the publication of his magnum opus, Religion in Human Evolution.
The book has been highly acclaimed. As stated by one of the nominators of the AAR book award for A Joyfully Serious Man, the book is ultimately “about the study of religion. In all his writing, as well as in his private life, Bellah was searching for an understanding of what religion was, and how it both shapes and is shaped by the social forces around him.
Four scholars will comment the biography of Bellah and engage the author in a conversation based upon their disciplines.
Panelists
Mark Juergensmeyer, University of California, Santa Barbara
Philip Gorski, Yale University
Jeff Alexander, Yale University
Responding
Matteo Bortolini, University of Padua
A Joyfully Serious Man: The Life of Robert Bellah
A Roundtable Conversation with author, Matteo Bortolini
American Academy of Religion
Presider:
Harlan Stelmach isEmeritus Professor of Humanities, Dominican University of California. His main teaching focus has been in the areas of ethics and social theory. His writings span a range of topics from the future of the humanities and liberal education to the role of religion in human evolution. He is co-author of Ethics in a Diverse World with Robert Traer.
Moderator
Mark Juergensmeyer is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Global Studies, Sociology, and affiliate of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was the founding director of the Global and International Studies Program and the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies. He is an expert on religious violence, conflict resolution and South Asian religion and politics. His widely read Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence is based on interviews with religious activists around the world–including Jihadi activists, ISIS supporters, leaders of Hamas, and abortion clinic bombers in the United States; an earlier edition was listed by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times as one of the best nonfiction books of the year. He is a past president of the American Academy of Religion.
Panelists
Philip S. Gorski is a comparative-historical sociologist with strong interests in theory and methods and in modern and early modern Europe. His empirical work focuses on topics such as state-formation, nationalism, revolution, economic development, and secularization with particular attention to the interaction of religion and politics. Other current interests include the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences and the nature and role of rationality in social life. His most recent book with co-author Samuel Perry, The Flag, and the Cross: White Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy is the subject of a session this year at AAR.
Jeffrey C. Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Founder and co-director of the Center for Cultural Sociology , he is also co-editor of The American Journal of Cultural Sociology. Alexander works in the areas of theory, culture, and politics. An exponent of the “strong program” in cultural sociology, he investigates the role that codes, narratives, performances, and material icons play in various social arenas. He is the author of the groundbreaking book The Civil Sphere (2006) and, most recently, What Makes a Social Crisis? The Societalization of Social Problems (2019).
Anna Sun is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Duke University. Sun is a scholar of Confucianism in particular and of contemporary Chinese religious life in general. Her research interests include the 19th century production of knowledge about Chinese religions; the development of Global Confucianisms in the 21stcentury; comparative ritual theory; and theoretical and methodological issues underlying the social scientific study of religion. She is the author of Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities. Princeton: Princeton University Press. In addition, she is the co-author with Steensland, Brian, and Jaime Kucinskas of, Situating Spirituality Context, Practice, and Power. Oxford University Press.
Respondent
Matteo Bortolini is associate professor of Sociology at the DSSGEA Department of the University of Padua. His research focuses on the sociology of intellectuals and ideas, social and political theory, the history of political and sociological thought, and the sociology of religion.
His volume “A Joyfully Serious Man. The Life of Robert Bellah” (Princeton University Press, 2021) won Distinguished Publication Award of the History of Sociology and Social Thought section of the American Sociological Association. His current research projects include a paper on the creation of a theory of religion in 1950s Harvard (with Andrea Cossu), the history of the volume “Il caso italiano” edited by F.L. Cavazza and S.R. Graubard in the early Seventies, and a biography of the American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz (1926-2006). He is working on an upcoming biography of Clifford Geertz.