Erik Olin Wright, Stardust to Stardust: Reflections on Living and Dying

Abstract

had done up to that moment and, at the same time, something incomparable to anything he had ever published’ (pp. 335–336). Remarkably, though not surprisingly, Religion was just a part of what Bellah had envisioned. Dropped from an early outline of the book were chapters on modernity in which he could incorporate his understanding of Japanese exceptionalism as a modern society with no axial breakthrough and his long-developing interpretation of the United States as the product of the Protestant Reformation gone bad. Had all gone as planned, Bellah would have folded this latter idea into The Modern Project in Light of Human Evolution (p. 352), in which he would grapple with whether tradition could save modernity from itself. Of course, Bellah’s life did not always go as planned and this project, like modernity itself, was left unfinished when he died at age 86 in 2013. In a November 2011 panel on Religion, Bellah noted, ‘Recently somebody asked me: Why are you writing this book about religion when you should write your autobiography? I said: I am writing my autobiography, it’s the autobiography of the human race!’ (p. xii). Here again, Bellah was exaggerating only slightly. Bortolini notes the distinctive character of Religion as a text in which ‘the creative process had the same importance as the final outcome’. The text was performative, with ‘oscillations between truth claims and “the grounds for thinking them true”. . . . Bob was everywhere. . . . To put it another way, Bob was the book and the book was Bob’ (pp. 335–337). This, too, makes sense when we consider that a favorite passage of Bellah’s by poet William Butler Yeats reads, ‘Man can embody the truth but he cannot know it’. The truth Robert N. Bellah embodied was intellectual curiosity. I experienced this myself in 1989 when, as an undergraduate in his famous Sociology of Religion course, I visited him during office hours almost weekly. I would pepper him with juvenile questions he no doubt had heard before. Still, he listened to me in perfect silence, chin in hand, as if he had never heard the questions before, patiently answering each. As Matteo Bortolini’s beautiful biography shows over and over, the importance of intellectual curiosity is the ultimate lesson of Bellah’s life and work.