Geertz died in 2006 at the age of 80, so we cannot know his reaction to “Religion in Human Evolution,” the magnum opus that the 84-year-old Bellah has just published. But chances are good that he would have said much the same thing. Geertz the scholar would have been impressed by Bellah’s learning and command of his subject. As a thinker who insisted that human beings shape culture that in turn shapes them, however, Geertz would quite likely have been unhappy to see Bellah become so immersed in cognitive science, evolutionary psychology and other disciplines that often give short shrift to the human capacity for autonomy.

Of Bellah’s brilliance there can be no doubt. The sheer amount this man knows about religion is otherworldly. Although no field worker going off to locales like Bali, where Geertz spent so much of his time, Bellah has read prodigiously about religion in, among other places, Mesopotamia, Polynesia, the American Southwest, Australia and Brazil. When Bellah says that his book could have been much longer — he leaves out Christianity, Islam, indeed every religious development of the last 2,000 years — there is no reason to doubt him. Bellah stands in the tradition of such stalwarts of the sociological imagination as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. Only one word is appropriate to characterize this book’s subject as well as its substance, and that is “magisterial.”..."   more at NYT