A Joyfully Serious Man

Book excerpt: "Robert Bellah (1927-2013) was a hugely-influential twentieth-century American social scientist. During an intellectual career that spanned six decades, his work became central in many fields: the sociology of Japanese religion, the relationships between sociology and the humanities, the relationship between American religion and politics, the cultures of modern individualism, and evolution and society. His seminal 1967 essay "Civil Religion in America" created a huge debate across disciplines which continues to this day; his co-authored book Habits of the Heart (1985) was a bestseller (it sold close to 500,000 copies) and became the object of sustained public discussion about the temptations and dangers of radical individualism. His last magnum opus, an interpretation of 15,000 years of human history many years in the making entitled Religion in Human Evolution and published by HUP when Bellah was 84, was a capstone to an extraordinary scholarly and intellectual career. It has been reprinted numerous times and continues to sell. In this book Matteo Bortolini recounts not just the arc of this extraordinary scholarly career, but also an eventful and tempestuous life, including a youthful student affiliation with the Communist Party USA and a resulting McCarthy era exile to Canada, crushing personal tragedies (with the death of two of his four daughters in the 1970s), and, at the age of 50, a coming out as a gay man, which did not however sever his close ties with his wife of many decades, Melanie Hyman Bellah. The author has worked on this book for thirteen years, and during this time has conducted research at university archives around the world, including archives at Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, Berkeley, and McGill. Bortolini also interviewed some three dozen of Bellah's colleagues, former students, friends and relatives, including his two daughters, who have given this project their full support (without attempting to influence it in any way). They have also given the author full access to Bellah's personal papers. (Bellah's wife of many years predeceased him.) It is also noteworthy that when the obits appeared after Bellah's death, Bortolini was quoted in them as Bellah's biographer. So he is already widely recognized as the guy from whom we can expect a definitive biography of this man" -- Proporcionado por el editor.