The central icon of Catholic Christianity is mother and child. That motif is so deep in not just our human experience but in our animal, biological past.
Robert Neelly BellahLeaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves.
Robert Neelly BellahWe have to understand ourselves as a part of the narrative of evolution. And evolution never stops. The notion that human evolution at some point stopped and "history" took over is absurd, though it is widespread among various social scientists and humanists.
Robert Neelly Bellah...for limited purposes only, let me define religion as a set of symbolic forms and acts which relate man to the ultimate conditions of his existence.
Robert Neelly Bellah