Challenging Modernity

From the 1960s until his death in 2013, Robert N. Bellah was the preeminent figure in the study of religion and society. He broke new ground in mapping the religious dimensions of human experience, from the great breakthroughs of the first millennium BCE to the paradoxes of American civic life. In three final essays, published here for the first time, Bellah grapples with the contradictions of modernity, and seven leading thinkers respond with profound, exhilarating new perspectives on our present predicament.

Challenging Modernity critically assesses the modern project to shed light on the tensions between its transcendent aspirations and the perils we now face. Its contributors analyze the roots of the collapse of the political, economic, and cultural institutions that promised perpetual progress but now threaten global catastrophe. Reflecting the range of Bellah’s scholarship, they span the disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. They extend Bellah’s insight that only deep historical, cultural, and religious understanding can help us meet modernity’s harrowing challenges by sharing responsibility for the global interdependence of our common fate.

Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction, by Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton
Part I. Diagnosing Modernity
1. The Modern Project in the Light of Human Evolution, by Robert N. Bellah
2. Turning Off Nature’s Thermostats: Technology, Ecology, and Deep History, by Kyle Harper
3. Thermostatlessness: The Project of Modernity and the Process of Modernization: Reflections on Robert Bellah’s Account of the Late Modern Predicament, by Hartmut Rosa
Part II. The Modern Project
4. Prologue in Heaven (or Hell) to the Modern Project, by Robert N. Bellah
5. Culture and Hope: Reflections on Bellah’s Unfinished Project, by Ana Marta González
6. Axiality and the Critique of Power, by Alan Strathern
7. Organic Social Ethic: Universalism Without Egalitarianism, by Hans Joas
Part III. The Challenge of Modernity
8. The Tillich Lecture: Paul Tillich and the Challenge of Modernity, by Robert N. Bellah
9. On the Search for “A Serious Ethical Form of Individualism”: Bellah, Tillich, and the Anthropology of Christian Individualism, by Joel Robbins
10. “Disenchantment of the World” or Fragmentation of the Sacred?, by Philip Gorski
Conclusion, by Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton
Contributors
Index