The brilliant but turbulent life of a public intellectual who transformed the social sciences

Robert Bellah (1927-2013) was one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century. Trained as a sociologist, he crossed disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of a greater comprehension of religion as both a cultural phenomenon and a way to fathom the depths of the human condition. A Joyfully Serious Man is the definitive biography of this towering figure in modern intellectual life, and a revelatory portrait of a man who led an adventurous yet turbulent life.

Drawing on Bellah's personal papers as well as in-depth interviews with those who knew him, Matteo Bortolini tells the story of an extraordinary scholarly career and an eventful and tempestuous life. He describes Bellah's exile from the United States during the hysteria of the McCarthy years, his crushing personal tragedies, and his experiments with sexuality. Bellah understood religion as a mysterious human institution that brings together the scattered pieces of individual and collective experiences. Bortolini shows how Bellah championed intellectual openness and innovation through his relentless opposition to any notion of secularization as a decline of religion and his ideas about the enduring tensions between individualism and community in American society.

Based on nearly two decades of research, A Joyfully Serious Man is a revelatory chronicle of a leading public intellectual who was both a transformative thinker and a restless, passionate seeker.

About the Author
Matteo Bortolini is associate professor of sociology at the University of Padua in Italy. He is the coauthor of Italian Sociology, 1945-2010: An Intellectual and Institutional Profile and the editor of The Anthem Companion to Robert N. Bellah. He lives in Bologna, Italy.

Reviews
"Winner of the History of Sociology and Social Thought Book Award, American Sociological Association"
"Bortolini's weaving of biography with the interpretation of a lifetime's intellectual labor into a narrative culminates in a picture of Bellah that brings together large-scale themes with telling detail both familiar and unfamiliar ... [this] terrific book is likely to be the first one to which scholars turn for a rich examination of Bellah's life for a very long time."---Susan E. Henking, Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences
"Bortolini has produced what one imagines will prove to be a matchless achievement."---Bryan S. Turner, Journal of Classical Sociology
"Matteo Bortolini has written the definitive biography of the American sociologist Robert Neelly Bellah."---Chad Alan Goldberg, Civic Sociology
"Bortolini weaves the strands together effortlessly. Personal loss, friendship, love, and grief are neither afterthoughts nor drivers of this narrative of a life. Rather we come to appreciate how the life and the mind worked together-sometimes in conflict, sometimes in sync. In a standard intellectual biography, life is often the background for thought. In this book, there is no distinction between them."---Joan Scott, Civic Sociology
"Robert Neely Bellah makes an excellent subject for a biography, and Matteo Bortolini has written a fascinating biography of him that illuminates his life, his work, and his times all at once."---Philip Gorski, The Hedgehog Review
"Bortolini's terrific book is likely to be the first one to which scholars turn for a rich examination of Bellah's life for a very long time."---Susan E. Henking, Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences
"A helpful and enjoyable biography of the American scholar Robert Bellah."---Evan Kuehn, Reading Religion
"Bortolini's account of [Bellah's] life is a major achievement for its author, an invaluable companion to Bellah's writings, and indispensable reading for anyone who wants to understand Bellah, his thought, and his times."---Chad Alan Goldberg, Sociological Forum
"Matteo Bortolini has made a remarkable contribution to postwar intellectual and social history, using as its prism the trajectory of one scholar to show some of the complex and conflicting tendencies of the time. I believe his book is a resource that any future intellectual or social history of the period would find relevant, and perhaps even indispensable."---Arvind Rajagopal, Civic Sociology
"While the book presents a persuasive, if subtle, plea to revive [Bellah's] hermeneutic insights, another of its many virtues-likely to ruffle far fewer feathers-is that it serves to make vivid what it is about the sociological imagination that makes it so dazzlingly irresistible. For this alone, A Joyfully Serious Man deserves a wide readership."---Galen Watts, Contemporary Sociology
"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."---David Yamane, International Sociology Reviews
"Bortolini, in this outstanding biography, introduces the readers to not only the oeuvre of a distinguished public intellectual, but also to his personhood, which, amidst personal calamity, could still pave a way as a fierce and passionate independent intellectual."---Alisha Saikia, Religious Studies Review
"To my knowledge, very few, if any, sociologists born in the 20th century have so far been the subject of a more documented biography than Matteo Bortolini's A Joyfully Serious Man, which is additional evidence of Bellah's importance for new generations of sociologists."---Federico Brandmayr, The American Sociologist
"One of the richest aspects of Bortolini's book is the way in which it enables us to see Robert Bellah against the backdrop of his times, to see his intellectual projects and his character shaped by the events and institutions he lived through."---Laura Ford, The American Sociologist
"Reading Bortolini on how Bellah first formulated, then had to defend, and then finally abandoned civil religion, encouraged me to think more systematically about issues that I find inherent in the public-ness of certain types of ideas generally."---Rhys Williams, The American Sociologist
"On a second outsider puzzle of interest - Bellah as an emblematic case of mid-century American academic - Bortolini is conspicuously successful. Bellah's life provides an exceedingly well-documented example of a particular generation of social scientists in America: those who were born in the interwar period and educated in the immediate postwar decades; who were wafted by the explosive growth of academia during the period 1945-1970; and who suffered in their academic primes the rapid transformations of America that took place from 1960 to 1980."---Andrew Abbott, The American Sociologist
"A Joyfully Serious Man: The Life of Robert Bellah will be the envy of social scientists and historians who write in the genre of biography, and it will long set the gold-standard for scholarship of this kind."---Charles Camic, The American Sociologist
"I think that you will relish the encounter that is available here with Bob Bellah. We owe a debt of gratitude to Matteo Bortolini for his wonderful portrait of this joyfully serious man."---Peter Blum, Tradition and Discovery
"Bortolini skillfully and compassionately balances the personal, academic, and cultural elements that comprised Bellah's life, and presents his theories in understandable and accessible terms."---Brian Bromberger, Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide
"Bortolini's beautifully written biography interweaves the major events of Bellah's personal life - some in Princeton and some previously undisclosed - with the evolving contours of American individualism, political opportunism, and therapeutic self-obsession that so deeply troubled him."---Robert Wuthnow, Princeton Alumni Weekly



Book Information
ISBN 9780691204406
Author Matteo Bortolini
Format Hardback
Page Count 528
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press