Robert N. Bellah dies - UC Berkeley professor

Megan Messerly, UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Robert N. Bellah, who died July 30, was best known for the 1985 best-selling book "Habits of the Heart."

Megan Messerly

August 9, 2013

Robert N. Bellah, a UC Berkeley professor renowned for exploring the intimate
relationship between American society and religious identity, died July 30 in Oakland. 
He was 86.

His death was caused by complications of heart surgery, the university said of its 
professor emeritus of sociology.

In his 1967 essay, "Civil Religion in America," Professor Bellah posited the idea
that "civil religion," a nonsectarian, abstract faith, binds together the fabric of American 
society - a concept for which he won acclaim within the sociological community.

"He was moving toward a powerful critique of global cultural experience," said Ann Swidler, 
a colleague of Professor Bellah's in the sociology department at UC Berkeley. 
"He is kind of a demigod in the world of sociology."

Although Professor Bellah wrote or collaborated on more than a dozen books, the 1985
best-seller "Habits of the Heart" leaves perhaps the most lasting legacy in academic and
popular circles.

In the book, which sold almost 500,000 copies in its first decade of publication, Bellah 
and his four co-authors explore contemporary society and the beliefs that shape it
through a survey of middle-class Americans.

On Wednesday, Professor Bellah's four co-authors met at UC Berkeley to partake in 
an annual tradition that began after "Habits" was published, coming together for a couple 
of days to discuss their most recent research.

This year, they remembered Professor Bellah and discussed his most recent work 
- papers that would have constituted core sections of his new book about modernity, 
said Swidler, one of the co-authors.

"There is a line from Aeschylus he loved: 'Time in its aging course teaches all things,' " 
said "Habits" co-author Steven M. Tipton, a professor of sociology and religion at 
Emory University in Atlanta. "The well of the past is deep, and from it Bob drew
 practical wisdom and living water."

Robert Neelly Bellah was born Feb. 23, 1927, in Altus, Okla., where his father was
 the editor and publisher of the local newspaper. When he was 2 years old, Professor 
Bellah's father died and the family moved to Los Angeles.

Professor Bellah's wife, Melanie, died in 2010. He is survived by two daughters, 
Hally Bellah-Guther of Berkeley and Jennifer Bellah Maguire of Los Angeles; a sister,
 Hallie Bellah Reynolds; and five grandchildren.

In 2000, Professor Bellah was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President 
Bill Clinton for his contributions to sociological research on American society.

But for all of Professor Bellah's praise from the academic community, colleagues who
knew him personally say he was a "regular person" who happened to be "smarter than 
most people - and philosophically trained."

Every Sunday, Professor Bellah dined with Bellah-Guther, whose three children often
performed concerts for their classical-music-loving grandfather on the piano and cello.

"Sometimes these brilliant people can be harsh in personal lives, but he was a very loving,
generous, kind person," she said. "Every day, every single time I've been with my dad, 
he inspired me by telling me what he was thinking about what he was reading."

A memorial service for Professor Bellah will be held at 2 p.m. Aug. 20 at All Souls 
Episcopal Parish in Berkeley.

Megan Messerly is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail:mmesserly@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @meganmesserly

Expansion of Major Natural History Museum

Beyond dioramas - nature's new story in museums

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN, New York Times

August 8, 2013

Los Angeles -- - The traditional natural history museum is powerful and familiar, but it is also strange. It is weighty, ponderous, pieced together from relics of lost worlds. It evolved in the 19th century, displaying the geological cataclysms that molded the Earth's surface, the creatures that clambered into habitats and the indigenous cultures that were once considered closer to nature. No other museum genre has changed so glacially.

But the pace of evolution has been quickening. Last month, just in time for its centennial this fall, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County completed a $135 million multiyear refashioning: a transformation that has doubled its program space and added new exhibitions and reworked others, including a mammals hall in 2010 and a compelling dinosaur hall in 2011.

Its new entrance is a six-story-high glass pavilion designed by CO Architects in which a hanging skeleton of a 63-foot-long fin whale is silhouetted by 33,000 LED lights. Outside, a 3.5-acre "urban wilderness" designed by Mia Lehrer & Architects has replaced concrete parking lots. Some 31,000 plantings and a 27,000-gallon pond lure dragonflies and hummingbirds, while a curving stone wall harbors smaller samplings of urban wildlife.

Indoors, other examples of the region's creatures - including tarantulas, harvester ants and rats - appear as part of a new interactive Nature Lab that readily attracts parents along with their charges. And in what may be the greatest departure from archetype, "Becoming L.A.," a permanent 14,000-square-foot exhibition - the largest in the museum - surveys the history of Los Angeles.

But what kind of evolution is this, and what does it portend? Unlike the new Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, the Los Angeles museum has not embraced the style of the contemporary "science center." Under the guidance of the institution's president, Jane G. Pisano, its natural history heritage is preserved as well as transformed.

A T. rex and a Tourist

The stunning dioramas that were mounted in the 1920s and '30s remain graciously intact. So do the museum's greatest fossils. The original 1913 Beaux-Arts rotunda still makes its antique promise of nobility and grandeur. What natural history museum, though, would display, as we find here, one of the first crucifixes to make its way to California in the 18th century? Or the carefully scuffed shoes and torn clothes of Charlie Chaplin's tramp from "City Lights"? And while we would expect to see the skeletal remnants of a baby Tyrannosaurus, why the chassis of an equally extinct Tourist, a 1902 wooden car that was the best-selling automobile in California before World War I?

Including those items is part of the museum's effort at redefinition, although the curators were drawing on an eccentric set of collections that were never really part of the natural history tradition. 

To read more:  

http://www.sfchronicle.com/science/article/Beyond-dioramas-nature-s-new-story-in-museums-4715681.php