Robert Bellah lectured extensively.  The following lectures are currently available on the web.  Many of these lectures are not available anywhere else.
  • The Modern Project in Light of Human Evolution
    On March 19, 2013 at the University of Notre Dame, about four months before his death on July 30, 2013, Robert Bellah delivered one of his last lectures if not his last one. The title of the lecture is the title of the book he was engaged in writing at his death. Part of the significance of this profound lecture - and the Q&A that follows -- is the sense he gives us of the questions he was formulating and articulating, along with the answers he pursued, about the meaning of modernity
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  • Public Lecture by Robert Bellah: "Religion in Human Evolution"
    Shortly after the publication of his greatest work, Religion in Human Evolution, Professor Robert Bellah gave this lecture of the same title on October 18, 2011 at the University of Chicago. The Department of Sociology and the Committee on Social Thought sponsored the lecture. Han Joas, who is a professor in that department and a member of that committee and who is also the Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion, Faculty of Theology, Humboldt University of Berlin, and has worked with Professor Bellah, gives a wonderful introduction. Professor Bellah's lecture has two epigrams: "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible"  — Albert Einstein. And "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless" — Steven Weinberg.

  • Can We Imagine a Global Civil Religion?
    Alonzo L. McDonald Lecture at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University on the occasion of the Silver Anniversary Celebration of Emory University’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion Program. Friday, October 26, 2007

  • Can We Be Citizens of a World Empire? 
    Versions of this talk were delivered at Iliff School of Theology in Denver Colorado, on January 28, 2003, and at Pepperdine University, Malibu, California, on March 6, 2003. 

  • Is There a Common American Culture? 
    This YouTube video is an April 7, 1998 talk at Duke University, which originated as a plenary address to the American Academy of Religion on November 22, 1997 and was published in the fall 1998 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. An expanded version was published in William H. Swatos, Jr. and James K. Wellman, Jr., eds., The Power of Religious Publics (1999) and The Robert Bellah Reader (2006). Like “Civil Religion in America,” this is a classic Bellah essay, which stirs our collective conscience, stimulates conversation and provokes debate. The passion with which Professor Bellah delivers this talk adds to and brings out the meaning of the text as well.

  • Unitarian Universalism in Societal Perspective
    An address given to the Unitarian Universalist Association, General Assembly, Rochester, N.Y., June 27, 1998.  


  • Individualism and Commitment: "America's Cultural Conversation" 
    Portland State University March 7, 1995

  • Habits of the Heart:  Implication for Religion 
    A lecture and question and answer session held at St. Mark's Catholic Church in 1986.

  • Individualism and Commitment in American Life
    A lecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, February 20, 1986

  • Religion, Citizenship and the Crisis in Public Education
    In this talk, which is perhaps even more relevant after September 11, 2001 than in 1985 when he first gave it, Bellah interprets the crisis in public education in the context of how the United States has changed, especially since World War II, from a democratic to an imperial republic. He stresses the notion of education for character and citizenship in contrast to the prevailing notion of education for private advancement. Recognizing religion as dividing as well as uniting, Bellah also emphasizes the crucial role of religion in American history. "To leave it out is to empty the story of that which makes us citizens," he says. Telling the story of the United States as it is, including its religious dimension, neither piously nor cynically, will help to pull students away from an exclusive concern with private advancement and may, he adds, "save our democratic republic from the clutches of imperial power." 


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