Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution: four theoretical issues

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Bellah borrows the terms from Kenneth Burke. 2. Vestiges of Wordsworth's “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” 3. In the nineteenth century such a list of equivalencies would have included women, who were then conceptualized as more emotional and less rational than men, making them closer to children and primitives. 4. Such idealizations were also applied to “primitives.” 5. Even when, as in śrauta rituals, the point seems to simply be to follow the rules, evidencing thereby that one is “free from worldly attachment. The ritual is ad[rdot]s ⃛ārtha, without visible purpose or meaning other than the realization of its perfect order, be it only for the duration of the ritual and within the narrow compass of the ritual enclosure” (Heesterman, 1985 Heesterman , J.C. 1985 . The inner conflict of tradition: Essays in Indian ritual, kingship, and society . Chicago , IL , and London : University of Chicago Press . [Google Scholar], p. 3). 6. “There is nothing easier than the making of patterns; from planaria to babies, it is done with little apparent difficulty. But the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ and, above all, the ‘so what’ remain refractory” (Smith, 2000 Smith, J.Z. 2000. “In comparison a magic swells”. In A magic still dwells: Comparative religion in the postmodern age, Edited by: Patton, K.C. and Ray, B.C. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar], p. 4). 7. The word “objective” here should be taken in the philosophic sense of mutually accessible as an object.