##The gift of life. The sociology of religion in Talcott Parsons´ late work
In the last decade of his life, Talcott Parsons devoted a large part of his scholarly attention to the sociology of religion and to the history and symbolism of Christianity. This part of Parsons´s work has been almost completely neglected - both in the literature on Parsons and in the sociology of religion. In my interpretation, Parsons´s late systems-theoretical "human condition paradigm" is separated from his quasi-structuralist analyses of Jewish and Christian myths. The core of these myths is, according to Parsons, the idea of life as a gift. The article analyses the importance of this idea for (1) a sociological understanding of Christianity, (2) some aspects of contemporary moral theorizing, particularly the question how the Judeo-Christian tradition can be appropriated under the condition of highly developed autonomous individuality, and (3) the question of a latent Protestant bias in Parsons´s theory of social change.##
Keywords: Parsons, T., sociology of religion, religion, Protestant bias, Judeo-Christian tradition, Christianity, individuality
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