Anthem Companion to Robert N. Bellah

"In his long career Robert N. Bellah repeatedly crossed the boundaries between disciplines as well as those separating the academic field from the public sphere. Nevertheless, he consistently introduced himself as a sociologist of religion and was identified by others as such. A cursory look at existing literature confirms not only that Bellah's colleagues readily accepted his self-presentation, but also that they regarded him as an outstanding member of the profession. During his first moment of celebrity in the mid-1970s, for example, he was called "one of a very small number of contemporary pioneers in the sociology of religion," and some critics even feared that his growing eminence would cushion his work from rational critique (Stauffer 1975BIB-085; Johnson 1977BIB-064). Thirty years later, a piece published in the newsletter of the American Sociological Association styled Bellah as "the nation's preeminent scholar in the sociology of religion," while a symposium published in the Chronicle of Higher Education upgraded him to "one of sociology's most influential scholars."11 After all, in his seminal 2004 ASA presidential address Michael Burawoy (2005BIB-039) had already canonized Habits of the Heart as a classic of public sociology along with Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folks, and Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma. The 2013 obituaries cited in the opening section were but the tip of a massive, and very old, iceberg. In fact, Bellah's positioning within the sociology of religion, and sociology in general"--