Robert Neelly Bellah Quotes

• Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Teacher, Retirement, Teaching

  Robert Neelly Bellah (1985). “Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life”, p.65, Univ of California Press

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• We never get to the bottom of ourselves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with others in work, love and learning.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Who We Are, Faces, Sides

  Robert Neelly Bellah (1985). “Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life”, p.84, Univ of California Press

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• We have to treat others as part of who we are, rather than as a 'them' with whom we are in constant competition.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Competition, Words Of Wisdom, Who We Are

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• That happiness is to be attained through limitless material acquisition is denied by every religion and philosophy known to mankind, but is preached incessantly by every American television set.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Philosophy, Acquisition, Television

  Robert Neelly Bellah (1975). “The broken covenant: American civil religion in time of trial”, Harper San Francisco

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• Our culture is at a critical cusp - a time that requires that we define what it means to be a citizen in a democracy. Within our nation we need to foster a greater sense of collective responsibility.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Mean, Responsibility, Democracy

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• ...for limited purposes only, let me define religion as a set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Men, Religion, Purpose

  Robert Neelly Bellah, Steven M. Tipton (2006). “The Robert Bellah Reader”, p.24, Duke University Press

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• However painful the process of leaving home, for parents and for children, the really frightening thing for both would be the prospect of the child never leaving home.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Children, Home, Parent

  Robert Neelly Bellah (1985). “Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life”, p.58, Univ of California Press

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• The academic world is one of the few places where prejudice is supposed to be totally banned, and we're politically correct on everything, but it's still a place where you can attack religion out of utter, complete, bottomless ignorance and not be considered to have done anything wrong.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Ignorance, Prejudice, Done

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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• It's clear all the way through history that practices are primary and beliefs are secondary.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Practice, Way, Belief

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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• Human culture, in evolutionary terms, moves from episodic, to mimetic, to mythic, to theoretic - that made all kinds of sense. To some extent, ontogeny repeats phylogeny, because children go through something like the same thing.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Children, Moving, Culture

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

  9 Copy quote

• While there are practical and sometimes moral reasons for the decomposition of the family, it coincides neither with what most people in society say they desire nor, especially in the case of children, with their best interests.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Children, People, Desire

  "The Good Society". Book by Robert Neelly Bellah, Richard Madsen, Steven M. Tipton, William M. Sullivan and Ann Swidler (Chapter 1), 1991.

  61 Copy quote

• The central icon of Catholic Christianity is mother and child. That motif is so deep in not just our human experience but in our animal, biological past.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Mother, Children, Animal

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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• We have imagined ourselves a special creation, set apart from other humans. In the last twentieth century, we see that our povertyis as absolute as that of the poorest nations. We have attempted to deny the human condition in our quest for power after power. It would be well for us to rejoin the human race, to accept our essential poverty as a gift, and to share our material wealth with those in need.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Race, Special, Essentials

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• We're [humans] running great risks of doing things that will not be good for us. The cost can be very high indeed if we reach the point where we can't adapt to our own increasingly rapid adaptations. We run the risk of early extinction. So this certainly isn't a triumphalist story, but it is trying to get at what, in the very long run, leads to the amazing creatures that we are.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Running, Long, Risk

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

  8 Copy quote

• The problem of the universal is difficult in every case. The universal and the particular can never be separated; they always go hand in hand.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Hands, Problem, Cases

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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• We have to understand ourselves as a part of the narrative of evolution. And evolution never stops. The notion that human evolution at some point stopped and "history" took over is absurd, though it is widespread among various social scientists and humanists.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Narrative, Evolution, Scientist

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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• The family is in flux, and signs of trouble are widespread. Expectations remain high. But realities are disturbing.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Reality, Expectations, Trouble

  "The Good Society". Book by Robert Neelly Bellah, Richard Madsen, Steven M. Tipton, William M. Sullivan and Ann Swidler (Chapter 1), 1991.

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• Hinduism, Confucianism, and Buddhism are huge traditions of enormous importance, and they aren't monotheistic. Again, this reflects the fact that our preconceptions about what religion is are so influenced by Protestantism - either real Protestantism or the secularized Protestantism that dominates our culture - and its assumption that beliefs are the most important thing.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Real, Buddhism, Important

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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• Yet Buddhism is four hundred years older than Christianity, and if it's not a universal religion I don't know what a universal religion is. There's also a strong focus on selectionism and the notion that religion plays a functional role in the evolutionary process. But religion is dysfunctional all the time, as well as functional. It's not so simple.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Strong, Buddhism, Simple

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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• We may wonder at the choice of Israel and Rome as the archetypes of the new nation, in view of the long history of suffering of the former and the decline of the latter. We may wonder that our ancestors over-looked the darker days of those earlier nations. They did not. They hoped to construct a republic on principles to sound that if we should decline in piety and public virtue we would meet the inexorable fate of nations, which are as but dust in the hands of God.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Fate, Israel, Views

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• "Nothing is ever lost" means that what we are now goes all the way back through natural history. We are biological organisms and not simply computerized brains. By focusing totally on the present, thinking only about science and computers, and forgetting four billion years of life on this planet, we are losing perspective on who and what we are.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Mean, Thinking, Years

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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• One of the important things about religion is that it is a sphere which is partially protected from selection. Religious creativity occurs when people pull out of the whole selectivity issue. Becoming celibate - obviously you couldn't be less selective that that. Yes, selection is always in the background. But it's not always there in the foreground. If you don't understand that, you're missing a lot.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Religious, Creativity, Issues

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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• Women have entered the work force . . . partly to express their feelings of self-worth . . . partly because today many families would not survive without two incomes, partly because they are not at all sure their marriages will last. The day of the husband as permanent meal-ticket is over, a fact most women recognize, however they feel about "women's liberation.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Husband, Self Worth, Two

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