Peter L. Berger

Pluralism is often perceived as a threat to faith, associated with relativism and a loss of religious substance. I take a contrary position. It seems to me that pluralism is good for faith. For several years now, my work as a sociologist has circled around the phenomenon of pluralism. The result of . . . . Continue Reading »

Rudolf Bultmann, the German New Testament scholar whose program for the “demythologization” of the Gospel provoked a storm of controversy in the years after World War II, wrote in his seminal essay: “It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of . . . . Continue Reading »

When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God ?by T. M. Luhrmann Knopf, 464 pages, $28.95 The methods of anthropology were developed in the early years of the discipline, when its practitioners went to study so-called savages in exotic locales. In more recent . . . . Continue Reading »

Peter Berger recounts his lifelong friendship with Richard . . . . Continue Reading »

A century after Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, religion has still not . . . . Continue Reading »

Ivan Illich died in Bremen on December 2, 2002 at the age of seventy-six. As a German friend of his put it: “God gave him a beautiful death.” Illich suddenly collapsed while at work in his study and died immediately. The New York Times obituary noted, quite correctly, that Illich’s influence . . . . Continue Reading »

The title question has been asked frequently in recent years, both within and outside the field. I think that it can be answered rather easily: sociology has fallen victim to two severe deformations. The first began in the 1950s; I would label it as methodological fetishism. The second was part of . . . . Continue Reading »

The human sciences in America are in a state of advanced and seemingly irreversible decay. One look at the programs for the annual meetings at which the practitioners of these disciplines gather suffices to convince one of this diagnosis. There are exceptions, of course. Here and there one finds . . . . Continue Reading »

Much of social life is explained and justified with cliches—those little capsules of folk wisdom that suggest some fact of life is normal or even morally just. It could not be otherwise. If we had to figure out from scratch what each situation in our life means, we would all go crazy. The . . . . Continue Reading »

Christian conservatives generally subscribe to two strongly held propositions: that a return to Christian values is necessary if the moral confusion of our time is to be overcome, and that the Enlightenment is to blame for much of the confusion. Looked at empirically, these two propositions . . . . Continue Reading »