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This chapter begins by illustrating how love can simultaneously involve sickness and immorality, using examples of jealousy, unrequited love, and sadomasochism. It then outlines a virtue-oriented conception of healthy love, illustrating how moral and therapeutic conceptions of love overlap. The chapter concludes by replying to Robert Bellah's criticisms of the therapeutic trend regarding love.

Robert Bellah’s 1967 essay “Civil Religion in America” launched a scholarly subdiscipline on the topic that spread across American history, American studies, sociology, religious studies, and political science. The concept has been dissected, amended, critiqued, forgotten, and resurrected. The introduction presents Bellah’s concept of civil religion, contrasts it with other versions, such as that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and examines the changes in American society and religion in the half century since Bellah’s publication. It presents an overview of the chapters to follow and the themes that might inform scholarship going forward.

This chapter considers further theoretical contributions made by the work of Edward Shils, Robert Bellah, and Jeffrey Alexander. This clarifies a series of key points, notably the historical contingency of sacred forms, their moral ambiguity, the simultaneous presence of multiple sacred forms in modernity, and the value of distinguishing between the sacred, the profane and the mundane. The chapter concludes by discussing the nature of knowledge that is generated by the kind of cultural sociological approach developed through the book, arguing that it should be understood as an interpretative practice which seeks to explain relationships between social agents, cultural meanings and social structures.

This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the debate on the so-called Axial Age. It presents the major contributors from Karl Jaspers on, but also the predecessors in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. , It explores concepts such as the age of transcendence that have been used to characterize the fundamental innovation of that age. It particularly emphasizes the emergence of moral universalism in that period. The chapter also attempts to bring the different perspectives together by interpreting a reflexive view of the sources of sacredness as a major turning point in the global history of religion.

What values and practices—religious or secular—shape civic engagement? Most colleges and universities aim for their students to become involved citizens, but this process becomes a fraught enterprise when differing values and moral visions of the world clash. Some proponents of civic engagement are activists, seeking to change the world through political means, while others are community servants, devoted to helping those in need and to maintaining the community organizations that benefit everyone. Religion is a significant, but frequently invisible, motivational factor in both forms of engagement. Religion also plays a role in determining the focus for civic engagement, forcing decisions about whether the preeminent loyalty is to friends and the local community, to the nation, to humanity as a whole, or to all living things.

Philip S. Gorski’s chapter provides historical context for progressive religious groups’ use of civil religious rhetoric. Through an analysis of Barack Obama’s efforts to resurrect the civil religious tradition during his two campaigns and terms as president, this chapter revisits and reconstructs the vision of American civil religion that was originally advanced by Robert Bellah in 1967. The chapter shows that the American civil religion is woven out of two main threads: the prophetic religion of the Hebrew Bible and an Anglo-American version of civic republicanism. It also distinguishes the civil religious tradition from its two main rivals: religious nationalism and radical secularism.

Chapter 3 explores the notion that, like war, religion is an imagined alternative reality. The chapter begins with the remarkable success of the Left Behind novels, Evangelical Protestant novels that imagine the end of the world at the time of the rapture, when righteously saved souls are transported to heaven and the ordinary world struggles with the control of the Antichrist. Though extreme, this vision is characteristic of all religion: it presents an alternative view of reality. All religion is imagined in that they are constructions of an alternative view of reality, as the sociologist Robert Bellah has argued. Like war, religion is a response to a perception of deep disorder, though in the case of religion it is often the fear of one’s own demise, the fear of death. For this reason most religious traditions have incorporated violence and death into their rituals and images (the Christian cross is an obvious example), as a way of showing that in the religious imagination the fear of chaos is overcome and death has been defeated. As does war, religion provides an imagined scenario of chaos conquered.

This chapter observes that many undergraduates find themselves drawn to more than one religious tradition, philosophical perspective, or lifestance. Indeed, the concept of “multiple religious belonging” may describe a very common circumstance, in which human beings find themselves drawn to, and sometimes overwhelmed by, an eclectic blend of beliefs and practices. Certain parallels may be drawn between these experiences and the broader experience of adolescent women, who find themselves pulled in many directions by the demands of contemporary culture. The chapter brings together a discussion of Mary Pipher’s book Reviving Ophelia with the example of “Sheila” in Habits of the Heart (ed. Robert Bellah et al.). Rather than assuming that experiences of multiple belonging result from confusion or indifference, the author counsels meeting these perspectives where they are, exploring how this quest for meaning might positively shape vocational reflection and discernment.