Robert N. Bellah (1927-2013) was an American sociologist, public intellectual, and educator. A student of Talcott Parsons, he became known in the 1950s as a Japanologist and a theorist in the sociology of religion. During the 1970s he started the ‘American civil religion’ debate and contributed to the interpretive/hermeneutical turn in the social sciences. In the 1980s he was one of the co-authors of one of the most successful books in the history of sociology, Habits of the Heart. Toward the end of his life he published his magnum opus, Religion in Human Evolution.