"For the sociologist Robert Bellah, questions about the meaning and responsibility of human beings in the present emerge out of our self-awareness of our responsibilities to one another and the planet. He places religion as the central social institution through which this is understood. At the time of his passing in 2013, Bellah had begun formulating what would have been his next book, a narrative that demonstrated how the axial age (500 - 300 BCE) legacies have been transformed but are still relevant, for better and worse, in the present age. The modern project, he believed, drew upon axial insights to conceive justice and freedom, but the historically unprecedented technological, economic, and demographic expansion of modernity has produced increasing threats to our precarious interdependence with each other and the entire biosphere. In Challenging Modernity the coauthors of the landmark Habits of the Heart bring together the three unpublished essays that would have been the foundation of Bellah's next book. These include lectures from Notre Dame and Harvard that provide a metanarrative of metanarratives, concluding with a a vision of human aspirations in a morally fragmented world. Next is an engagement with Ian Morris's social development index, which quantifies energy consumption and organizational complexity over time and questions how we as a species can adapt to a rate of change that no biological species has ever faced before. Finally, Bellah's Paul Tillich lecture engages the dialectic of the prophetic and sacramental tradition of religion and what they tell us about the needs of societies to function. The book will include an introduction and conclusion as well as additional essays to provide context. In sum, the book challenges us to engage with the big questions that Bellah left for us. Can the universal insights of the Axial Age be reimagined, renewed, and politically enacted in modern institutions? Can we realize universal human rights and responsibilities? Through deliberating and deciding in common, can we pursue social goods diverse and encompassing enough for all of us to share in order to survive and flourish in practice? We will never know for certain what Bellah would have concluded, but in this book we see him trying to think this through"--
