Thread by @davidyamane

Was asked to review this but have been putting it off. I am more worried about what it will say about me as a person and scholar than what I have to say about it. But I need a break this morning so here I go.

#soctwitter #BookTwitter #bookreview #bellah

Enjoying this biography of Bellah by Matteo Bortolini of the U of Padua. It's very well written for a sociologist, much less one who I assume is not a native English speaker. It is a full biography not just an intellectual biography.

TIL: Bellah's father abandoned his family and committed suicide, leading him to be renamed Robert Neeley. He was a competitive individualist in HS. And he served a year in the Army after he arrived at Harvard.

TIL: Melanie Bellah graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford but also played the role of 1950s wife to Robert Bellah. When I was in his class in the late 1980s, you would schedule office hours appointments by calling her.

Interesting background to Bellah's Weberian analysis of modernization of Japan, Tokugawa Religion: He was denied a passport to do research in Japan bc of his past membership in the Communist Party.

Tokugawa Religion: The Values of Pre-industrial Japan g.co/kgs/BZGnCB

Like me, Bellah was turned down for membership in the Harvard Society of Fellows. In my application, I proposed to research and intellectual biography of Robert Bellah. If I only knew he was not Society of Fellows material I would have picked a different subject!

Gaining new insights into Bellah's scholarship from Bortolini biography which I will cover in my review. But the personal revelations are remarkable. Leaving Harvard rather than naming names and the blowup at the Institute for Advanced Study are better known than some others...

Erving Goffman calling Bellah "Talcott's fair haired boy (who) never had to compete for anything" to his face is a zinger that certainly triggered his academic inferiority complex that sat uneasily with his belief that he could be the next Max Weber.

Not to mentioned Bellah's open marriage and repressed homosexuality that once undammed was (by his own account) responsible for less productive than promised sabbatical year in the late 1970s.

And the loss of two of his four daughters very young, one to suicide and one to a car accident. How do you rebound from that?

This image of Bellah, taken on my birthday of all days, shows the joyful seriousness @ponyluna says characterizes the man. It is a look that I saw each time I visited his office hours to pester him with juvenile questions. He always took me seriously.

A highly visible student of Parsons, respected specialist in the sociology of religion and Japan, and public intellectual, I thought I knew Bellah and his work. Bortolini shows I had no idea. Trying to piece together a coherent review now.

It makes no sense professionally to spend a week on an academic book review, but Bellah's influence on me was profound so thinking about Bortolini's thorough biography is also very personal.

press.princeton.edu/books/hardcove…

My MS thesis took an experience-centered approach to relig & used Lindbeck's concepts of "experiential-expressive" & "cultural-linguistic" views, both of which I took directly from Bellah. Using GSS data to test the ideas reflected my Wisconsin training.

jstor.org/stable/3712173

I proudly sent a (hard) copy of the article to Bellah & he responded with a kind letter right away. Seeing the endnotes in Bortolini's biography shows Bellah was a lifelong, profuse, and generous letter writer. He signed the letter "Bob," a name I could never use to address him.

Working up my diss proposal, I dove into the literature on secularization theory. Bellah's idea that secularization & death of religion are not equivalent grounded my approach.

jstor.org/stable/1387887

My first book on religion developed my dissertation into a natl study of the role of State Conferences of Catholic Bishops in politics. This reflected Bellah's view that churches had an important role to play in public life.

amazon.com/Catholic-Churc…

As Bortolini notes, Bellah saw post-conciliar Catholics as an example of the "public church" and consulted on the drafting of the US Catholic bishops' 1986 pastoral letter on the economy, "Economic Justice for All."

usccb.org/resources/econ…

Of course, many other people contributed to my work in these areas, duly noted in the acknowledgments for each piece. (Notably: My grad school advisor Richard Schoenherr, Mark Chaves, my diss comm incl @GorskiPhilip - who was Bellah's TA when I took Soc of Rel as an undergrad.)

It's remarkable for me to look back now & see Bellah's influence throughout this early work. But his biggest influence on me was even more personal. I grew up an "Enlightenment fundamentalist" in Calif so he was the first person I respected intellectually who was openly religious

Bortolini notes that this was a conscious decision he made in the 1980s: "his confidence in ... speaking in public as a Christian had visibly grown." Bellah said he wanted to bring "his intellectual training to a relationship with my faith in a way that can speak to other people"

Bellah did not convert me to Christianity but he modeled the possibility. I became Catholic in the 1993 & my second major project in the sociology of religion was a study of the church's process for doing so: The Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults.

amazon.com/Real-Stories-C…

20 years after my first Bellah-inspired publication, my book "Becoming Catholic" was published. Substantively it reflected themes I first learned in 1989: the importance of embodied practices, ritual, symbols, and community in religious life.

global.oup.com/academic/produ…

I knew Bellah as an Episcopalian but these themes clearly reflect what @jeffguhin calls "Robert Bellah's Catholic Imagination."

jeffguhin.com/wp-content/upl…

As I note in the acknowledgments to "Becoming Catholic," Bellah passed away in 2013, just before the book was published. I couldn't send him a copy or receive a generous (emailed?) response. The fact that one semester stayed with me for a quarter-century still amazes me today.

OK, enough procrastination. I need to digest the final 3 chs of Bortolini's biography which chronicle the writing and publication of Bellah's big book "Religion in Human Evolution" in 2011 & presumably all that was left on the table when he died in 2013

hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is…

With the help of my feline accountability partners, Binx and Jasper, I have finished reading "A Joyfully Serious Man." Now to digest, reflect on, and review it in 1,000 words. I told myself I would finish this today. 🤣🤣🤣😭

I obviously did not finish my book review yesterday. Today is taken up with our local Pride parade & celebration of my father-in-law's birthday, so committed to wrapping up tomorrow on Father's Day - appropriate since Bellah is the father of my intellectual work in soc of relig

I need more time bc I feel the burden of doing justice to such a deeply-researched and well-written book & our of respect for its profound subject. Part of me feels/fears/knows(?) that this will be my last significant engagement with Robert Bellah's thought, given my current work

I also am struggling not to make the review about me. Offloading some of my personal feelings here helps. I began this thread noting I was worried about what reviewing Robert Bellah’s life and work would say about my own. I feel better about the former than the latter.

I learned that Bellah was human after all. He suffered from hubris & struggled w imposter syndrome, squandered sabbatical time (in a year at the Center for Advanced Study he wrote just 12 pages of his planned book on religion), was thin-skinned in response to critics. Can relate

And some of the tragedies that befell him (loss of his father and two daughters) and difficult professional and personal experiences (opportunities lost due to membership in Communist Party, living decades with repressed sexual desire) I would not trade for my own privileged life

OTOH, my professional accomplishments have fallen far short of my aspirations. Yesterday, I made the mistake of opening the “Bellah” folder in the dead research projects directory on my computer. I found some scholarly goals articulated in a 25-year-old fellowship application.

Not selected for that fellowship, I took a job & did mostly normal sociology, incl institution-building work like editing the journal Sociology of Religion as an assistant professor & serving on professional association committees. Normie stuff Robert Bellah never did.

The 1st product of my proposed fellowship is simply lost to history. It addresses an issue whose time has passed or which was never an issue to start. The 2nd product, Bellah himself completed, albeit not in the now-defunct Heritage of Sociology series.

dukeupress.edu/The-Robert-Bel…

In 1997 I noted there was no intellectual biography written of then 70-year-old Robert Bellah. In retrospect that was for the best, bc I was too immature to do the job well & Bellah's thinking had not yet matured fully.

In fact, in 1997 he sent me a draft table of contents for his big book on "Religious Evolution" and a Preface to that book drafted in 1994. The work was very much still in progress.

What was published in 2011 as "Religion in Human Evolution" was structurally similar to what was proposed in 1997, but as Bortolini argues, the substance had developed considerably. Note the shift from RELIGOUS evolution to religion in HUMAN EVOLUTION.
hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is…

So, the 3rd product I proposed in 1997, a book-length treatment of Bellah's work, is now done, by Matteo Bortolini in "A Joyfully Serious Man." And much, much better than I could have done. The quality of the book befits the quality of the subject.

press.princeton.edu/books/hardcove…

No surprise here: Although wrapping it up on father's day would have been nice, I am not going to finish my review of the Bellah biography today. Too emotionally invested in doing it well and afraid of getting it wrong.

On this day also, Bellah's life is a reminder that Father's Day is not happy for some people. Thoughts are with you.

1-800-273-TALK

suicidepreventionlifeline.org/help-someone-e…

Not going to finish my review of Bortolini's biography of Bellah again today but I am making progress. Maybe too much progress because I have almost 4,000 words written for a 1,500 word review.

#bookreview #robertbellah #soctwitter #professionalservice

Bellah in response to a journo request for comment on Bush's "rid the world of evil" speech post-9/11: "I suggested how unlikely it is that we can 'rid the world of evil.'" Reporter: "I can't even rid my own neighborhood of evil." Bellah: "I can't even rid my own heart of evil."

I've pared my 4k words on Bortolini's biography of Bellah down to 2,200 coherent words. Now I just need to cut it by another 1/3 to 1,500 words and it's good to go. Or got to go. Not sure if it is any good. Hopefully a 1990 vintage Rocky Patel and an afternoon G&T will help.

I took a machete to my review of "A Joyfully Serious Life" (by @ponyluna for @PrincetonUPress) and hacked it down to 1,500 words. I will be interested to know what the Chinese editor of International Sociology Reviews thinks, but for now, cheers!

#bellah #bookreview #soctwitter

A Joyfully Serious Man: The Life of Robert Bellah by Matteo Bortolini has a special place on my bookshelf.

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#BookTwitter #BookReview #Bellah #soctwitter #religion