Peter Berger passed away
Yang, Fenggang
Late Tuesday evening, June 27, 2017, Peter L. Berger passed away at his home in Brookline. He was 88 years old and was preceded in death in May 2015 by his wife Brigitte Berger. He is survived by his two sons; Thomas is a distinguished Professor of International Relations at Boston University, where Brigitte was Professor Emerita of Sociology, and Peter was Professor Emeritus of Religion, Sociology, and Theology. While his death was somewhat unexpected, it followed a recent illness and hospitalization. A memorial service is anticipated in the early fall.
I first encountered Peter Berger ”on the page.” The pages of The Social Construction of Reality, to be exact. It introduced me – and the entire discipline -- to phenomenological ways of thinking about society, and it has shaped me – and our field -- ever since. Equally important, his theoretical masterpiece, The Sacred Canopy, has been my touchstone for forty years. It has stayed on my grad seminar syllabi, even after he himself admitted that the secularization process he theorized in the second half of the book ended up not being as universally inevitable as he expected. It is nevertheless a masterpiece because it weaves together the best thinking from a century of social theory (the footnotes are amazing!) and shows how religion is and must be part of the picture.
As I was in the midst of writing my dissertation, one of my committee members left Yale, and Kai Erikson suggested that he would ask Peter to be a reader. That’s when the Peter Berger on the page became an imposing and challenging real-life persence. He wrote a gracious and supportive review of my analysis of a Fundamentalist congregation, and I got my degree.
A decade later, an unannounced phone call from Peter ushered in the beginnings of the colleagueship I have cherished since. It was an invitation to undertake a research project that would be headquartered at the Institute on Culture Religion and World Affairs. Being headquartered there meant the beginning of dozens of conversations in the seminar room of 10 Lenox Street, with Peter inevitably at the head of the table. He sometimes referred to that room as his ”living room,” and I do think he truly lived there. A stunning array of intellectual talent has assembled around that table, and dozens of books have been birthed, nurtured, and celebrated there. I am grateful to have been in that company in that place with Peter.
Another decade passed, and my own journey brought me to Boston University, where Peter was among the people who most warmly welcomed me. 10 Lenox Street again became the home for a research project for me, as Peter midwifed a grant proposal through the Templeton Foundation to support the project that became Sacred Stories. Through these years as University colleagues, we served on dissertation committees together and thought together about how to strengthen sociology of religion at BU. Since he retired in 2010, I’ve missed seeing him on a regular basis.
Anyone who knew Peter not only knew his amazing intellect, but also his addiction to humor. He always had a new joke to share and frequently punctuated his theoretical excurses with a vivid story. But even more than humor, Peter was shaped by faith, the kind of faith that is built on skepticism, not certainty. Over the years he wrote almost as much about theological questions as about sociological ones, but his theological work was always deeply informed by his humanistic sociological sensibility. It’s a rare combination, but one I have valued and learned from.
Peter Berger carved out a unique place in the world. A very big unique place. I am grateful that I had the chance to be part of the space he touched.
Nancy Ammerman
June 28, 2018
Boston
Yang, Fenggang
Most people would regard Peter Berger primarily as a sociologist, but NYT’s obituary portraits him as a theologian. Anyway, it’s an interesting angle to look at him.
Peter Berger, Theologian Who Fought ‘God Is Dead’ Movement, Dies at 88
JUNE 29, 2017
Photo
Peter L. Berger in 2013. He argued that the skepticism of the atheist was just as questionable as blind faith. CreditBerkley Center
Peter L. Berger, an influential, and contrarian, Protestant theologian and sociologist who, in the face of the “God is dead” movement of the 1960s, argued that faith can indeed flourish in modern society if people learn to recognize the transcendent and supernatural in ordinary experiences, died on Tuesday at his home in Brookline, Mass. He was 88.
His death was announced by the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs, which he founded at Boston University in 1985 and directed until 2009. His son Thomas said the cause was heart failure.
Professor Berger, who was born in Austria, was the author of a shelf-full of books. He was known for his work in what is called the sociology of knowledge — understanding how humans experience everyday reality.
One of his two dozen volumes, “The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge,” which he wrote in 1966 with Thomas Luckmann, was honored by the International Sociological Association as one of the 20th century’s five most influential sociology books.
Professor Berger, who had a wry smile and deep-set eyes framed by a balding crown, came to wide attention during the charged debate over whether the concept of a deity was relevant in an increasingly secularized, technological world — a discussion that seemed to peak with a famous 1966 Time magazine cover whose stark red-on-black headline asked, “Is God Dead?”
Theologians like Paul Tillich, Gabriel Vahanian and Thomas J. J. Altizer produced works that, taken together, seemed to argue that post-Auschwitz society, being skeptical of a benevolent universe and absorbed with material gains, was losing its sense of the sacred — so much so that the vision of a transcendent deity had lost much of its force.
Some theologians seemed to reject traditional notions of theism, even arguing that Jesus should be seen more as a human role model than an actual deity.
Professor Berger pushed back against that trend in his book “A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural,” published in 1969 and for many years required reading in college sociology and theology courses.
He argued that the skepticism of the atheist was just as questionable as blind faith, though he conceded that secularism was on the rise — that cultural relevance had overtaken spiritual values.
“Whatever the situation may have been in the past,” he wrote, “today the supernatural as a meaningful reality is absent or remote from the horizons of everyday life of large numbers, very probably the majority, of people in modern societies, who seem to manage to get along without it quite well.”
Nevertheless, he wrote, people can enrich their religious sensibilities by finding “signals of transcendence” in common experiences: A mother’s reassuring a frightened child that all is well suggests a confidence in a trustworthy universe. A mortal’s insistence on hope in the face of approaching death implies a conviction that death may not be final. The ability to condemn monstrous evil suggests a belief in a moral ordering of the universe that may even be comfortable with the notion of hell. Laughter and play affirm “the triumph of all human gestures of creative beauty over the gestures of destruction.”
In a later book, Professor Berger recounted his own religious discovery that there was an “otherness which lurks behind the fragile structures of everyday life.”
Addressing his concern with creeping secularization, he argued that Protestants were uncritically embracing social movements instead of devoting themselves to the church’s unchanging scriptural message. He confronted mainstream Protestant divinity schools, asserting they were preoccupied with “making Christianity relevant” and spending more energy on courses in psychology, sociology and church management than on theology.
Yet, he said, theological training was essential if Christianity was to penetrate “the consciousness of this age.”
Professor Berger held a series of teaching positions at a number of campuses, including Boston University, as well as the New School for Social Research, Brooklyn College, Rutgers University and Boston College.
Peter Ludwig Berger was born on March 17, 1929, in Vienna, the son of George William and the former Jelka Loew. His mother, he recalled, filled him with stories of the glories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire under the Hapsburgs, an upbringing he credited for his generally conservative outlook.
Photo
“A Rumor of Angels” was required reading for years in college sociology and theology courses.
He immigrated to the United States when he was 17, shortly after World War II ended, and enrolled at Wagner College on Staten Island. He graduated in 1949 and did his doctoral work at the New School in Manhattan, where many on the faculty were brilliant émigrés who had escaped Hitler.
He also spent a year as a candidate for the ministry at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia before deciding to abandon the quest. He was reluctant, he later said, to preach the definition of Christian faith strictly according to the Lutheran Confessions. His thinking, he decided, fit best “within the traditions of Protestant liberalism.”
In 1960, after several teaching stints and Army service, he joined the faculty of the Hartford Seminary Foundation. He also wrote, for Doubleday, two critiques of the church as an institution: “The Noise of Solemn Assemblies: Christian Commitment and the Religious Establishment in America,” and “The Precarious Vision: A Sociologist Looks at Social Fictions and Christian Faith,” both published in 1961.
Both books urged a return to a Christian vision rooted in the Bible’s fundamentals and proved popular with younger Christians.
“A Rumor of Angels” enhanced his standing as a theologian. In 1969, the Vatican’s Secretariat for Nonbelievers asked him to organize a conference on secularization for scholars of various religious backgrounds.
Professor Berger collaborated on several books with his wife, Brigitte Berger, herself a prominent sociologist and author. One book looked at how technology and industrialization were breaking down the emotional bonds of community.
The couple met in Germany, where Professor Berger was working for a Protestant research firm after serving in the Army there for two years during World War II. Brigitte Kellner was a student and the daughter of a fiercely anti-Nazi German whom the Russians imprisoned after the war because he was a landowner. She and her mother escaped that fate by jumping off a train that was deporting them. She and Professor Berger met again in New York and married in 1959. She died in 2015.
Besides his son Thomas, Professor Berger is survived by another son, Michael, and two grandchildren.
Another book by him was “The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation.” It urged theologians concerned about declining faith to make “heretical” choices by finding the points of agreement between Christianity and Hinduism and Buddhism. It was nominated for a 1980 National Book Award.
Despite his stature, Professor Berger had some detractors. The Catholic philosopher Michael Novak (who died in February) praised the ideas in “A Rumor of Angels” as provocative but said the book’s tone “is patronizing and its arguments are hurriedly put together.”
Other critics rejected his scolding of Protestant churches for embracing social movements. Discussing “A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity” (1992) in The New York Times Book Review, the author and critic Eleanor Munro said his “argument seems lost in language” and took him to task for his animus toward “theologizing feminists.”
“The text is peppered around the edges with a quantity of neoconservative bigotry,” she wrote.
Before the century was over, Professor Berger confessed that he had erred in asserting that modernity necessarily diminished faith. Except for locales like Western Europe and social groups like intellectuals, most of the world is as religious as ever, he concluded.
The belief in Jesus, he wrote in 1998 in The Christian Century, the journal of liberal Protestantism, might be slumping in mainline churches but was flourishing “in those ‘weak’ places where people are unsure of themselves, groping for a few glimpses of truth to hold onto.”
Professor Berger traveled to countries like India to better appreciate third world cultures and religions other than the Judeo-Christian faiths. Given the power of religions like Islam within their societies, he realized that his fixation with secularization was “ethnocentric.”
The poverty he saw on his excursions also led him to grapple with political ideas, particularly the ideologies aimed at alleviating misery, though he concluded in “Movement and Revolution” (1970), a collection of essays by him and the theologian Richard John Neuhaus, that reform was possible without radical shifts like Marxism.
In another political writing venture, a 1971 article in The New Republic with his wife, he predicted that the newly college-educated children of the largely white lower-middle and working classes would supplant the children of the upper-middle class at the top of a technological society because so many of the more affluent young were counterculture revolutionaries who had rejected the Protestant work ethic.
From: "Chine...@googlegroups.com" <chine...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Yang, Fenggang" <fy...@purdue.edu>
Reply-To: "Chine...@googlegroups.com" <chine...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday, June 29, 2017 at 10:38 AM
To: "Chine...@googlegroups.com" <chine...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [ChineseSSSR] Peter Berger passed away
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Christian Jochim
Coordinator, Asian Studies Program
Professor of Comparative Religious Studies
San Jose State University
San Jose, CA 95192-0092
408 924-4465
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Yang, Fenggang
Here is another interesting obituary of Peter Berger, on Washington Post. I think this one is better than the NYT one. And it’s surprising to learn about his Jewish background and life in Palestine.
The article mentioned at the end of this obituary is “Secularization Falsified”, a succinct summary of his thought on this issue.
The link is: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/02/secularization-falsified
Peter Berger, sociologist who argued for ongoing relevance of religion, dies at 88
By Harrison Smith July 2 at 6:24 PM
Peter L. Berger, a sociologist and theologian who saw signs of the divine in quotidian moments of everyday life and, in the thick of the 1960s “God is dead” movement, argued for religion’s continued relevance in modern society, died June 27 at his home in Brookline, Mass. He was 88.
Dr. Berger had a heart ailment, said a son, Thomas Berger.
The author of more than two dozen books, Dr. Berger was a professor emeritus of sociology, religion and theology at Boston University and a self-described snoop happy to learn from both prostitutes and priests.
“We could say that the sociologist, but for the grace of his academic title, is the man who must listen to gossip despite himself, who is tempted to look through keyholes, to read other people’s mail, to open closed cabinets,” he wrote in one of his earliest books, the popular 1963 introductory work “Invitation to Sociology.”
Dr. Berger, born into a Jewish family in Vienna, planned to become a Lutheran minister before turning to academia, where he spent much of his career bridging reason and faith and defying easy labels.
He organized academic conferences as well as Catholic intellectual debates for the Vatican; attended civil rights and antiwar demonstrations in the 1960s before becoming a leading neoconservative critic; and identified as a Lutheran while sometimes attending Anglican and Eastern Orthodox worship services.
His work focused on religion’s role in society but ranged widely to include studies on capitalism and Third World development. He believed capitalism and democracy were intrinsically linked, as were socialism and authoritarianism.
Dr. Berger also made major contributions to the field known as sociology of knowledge, which studies the ways in which society shapes human thought. H is 1966 book “The Social Construction of Reality,” co-written with Thomas Luckmann, was named the 20th century’s fifth most influential work of sociology by the International Sociological Association and was translated into more than 20 languages.
Beginning with a subsequent volume, “A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural” (1969), Dr. Berger offered a rejoinder to the “God is dead” movement, a strain of radical theology united around the argument that religion had lost its force in modern society.
As Dr. Berger saw it, religious belief remained an intellectually valid way of understanding the world. He drew readers’ attention to what he saw as “signals of transcendence,” moments that pointed to an “otherness which lurks behind the fragile structures of everyday life.” Laughter, in particular, pointed to “the triumph of all human gestures of creative beauty over the gestures of destruction.”
That human beings were capable of laughing at all, in a world filled with such cruelty and malice that Dr. Berger and his family were driven from his childhood home, was to his mind a sign of human beings’ connection with a higher power.
Peter Ludwig Berger was born on March 17, 1929. His father ran a clothing store and was a cavalry officer in Austria-Hungary during World War I, and his mother was a homemaker who later crafted hand-painted jewelry.
The family converted to Christianity when Dr. Berger was a child and fled the country to escape Nazi persecution when Germany annexed Austria in 1938. They eventually settled in British Palestine, where Dr. Berger’s closest friends included Muslims, Jews and Catholic Christians — a religious mix that, according to his son, led Dr. Berger to develop a pluralistic sensibility at a young age.
He came to the United States shortly after World War II ended, and in 1949 he received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Wagner College in New York. His graduate studies at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan spoke to his range of interests: For his master’s degree in 1950, he produced a thesis on Puerto Rican Protestants in East Harlem; for his doctorate four years later, he focused on the Bahai movement in Iran.
He married Brigitte Kellner, a fellow sociologist, in 1959. She died in 2015.
Survivors include two sons, Michael Berger of Framingham, Mass., and Thomas Berger of Newton, Mass.; and two grandchildren.
Dr. Berger served in the Army for two years in the mid-1950s and taught at schools including Rutgers University and Boston College before landing at Boston University in 1981. Four years later, he founded that university’s Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs, where he served as director until 2009.
His later work was marked by a wholesale reversal: a belief that religion was not declining, dissolving into obscurity in an increasingly secular world, but was holding fast and even growing in some places, offering an increasing number of ways for human beings to find solace in a frightening world.
“Modernity is not characterized by the absence of God,” he wrote in a 2008 essay for the journal First Things, “but by the presence of many gods.”
From:
"Chine...@googlegroups.com" <chine...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Christian Jochim <christia...@sjsu.edu>
Reply-To: "Chine...@googlegroups.com" <chine...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday, June 30, 2017 at 11:38 AM
To: "Chine...@googlegroups.com" <chine...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [ChineseSSSR] Peter Berger passed away
It is indeed ironic that he coined the phrase "methodological atheism" to describe the approach to be taken in Religious Studies, even if one is religious at heart, yet is remembered by NYT for his mediocre theology rather than for his great sociology of religion.
Chris Jochim
Chris Jochim
Coordinator, Asian Studies Program
Professor of Comparative Religious Studies
San Jose State University
San Jose, CA 95192-0092
408 924-4465
On Fri, Jun 30, 2017 at 6:13 AM, Yang, Fenggang <fy...@purdue.edu> wrote:
Most people would regard Peter Berger primarily as a sociologist, but NYT’s obituary portraits him as a theologian. Anyway, it’s an interesting angle to look at him.
Peter Berger, Theologian Who Fought ‘God Is Dead’ Movement, Dies at 88
JUNE 29, 2017
Photo
Peter L. Berger in 2013. He argued that the skepticism of the atheist was just as questionable as blind faith. CreditBerkley Center
Peter L. Berger, an influential, and contrarian, Protestant theologian and sociologist who, in the face of the “God is dead” movement of the 1960s, argued that faith can indeed flourish in modern society if people learn to recognize the transcendent and supernatural in ordinary experiences, died on Tuesday at his home in Brookline, Mass. He was 88.
His death was announced by the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs, which he founded at Boston University in 1985 and directed until 2009. His son Thomas said the cause was heart failure.
Professor Berger, who was born in Austria, was the author of a shelf-full of books. He was known for his work in what is called the sociology of knowledge — understanding how humans experience everyday reality.
One of his two dozen volumes, “The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge,” which he wrote in 1966 with Thomas Luckmann, was honored by the International Sociological Association as one of the 20th century’s five most influential sociology books.
Professor Berger, who had a wry smile and deep-set eyes framed by a balding crown, came to wide attention during the charged debate over whether the concept of a deity was relevant in an increasingly secularized, technological world — a discussion that seemed to peak with a famous 1966 Time magazine cover whose stark red-on-black headline asked, “Is God Dead?”
Theologians like Paul Tillich, Gabriel Vahanian and Thomas J. J. Altizer produced works that, taken together, seemed to argue that post-Auschwitz society, being skeptical of a benevolent universe and absorbed with material gains, was losing its sense of the sacred — so much so that the vision of a transcendent deity had lost much of its force.
Some theologians seemed to reject traditional notions of theism, even arguing that Jesus should be seen more as a human role model than an actual deity.
Professor Berger pushed back against that trend in his book “A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural,” published in 1969 and for many years required reading in college sociology and theology courses.
He argued that the skepticism of the atheist was just as questionable as blind faith, though he conceded that secularism was on the rise — that cultural relevance had overtaken spiritual values.
“Whatever the situation may have been in the past,” he wrote, “today the supernatural as a meaningful reality is absent or remote from the horizons of everyday life of large numbers, very probably the majority, of people in modern societies, who seem to manage to get along without it quite well.”
Nevertheless, he wrote, people can enrich their religious sensibilities by finding “signals of transcendence” in common experiences: A mother’s reassuring a frightened child that all is well suggests a confidence in a trustworthy universe. A mortal’s insistence on hope in the face of approaching death implies a conviction that death may not be final. The ability to condemn monstrous evil suggests a belief in a moral ordering of the universe that may even be comfortable with the notion of hell. Laughter and play affirm “the triumph of all human gestures of creative beauty over the gestures of destruction.”
In a later book, Professor Berger recounted his own religious discovery that there was an “otherness which lurks behind the fragile structures of everyday life.”
Addressing his concern with creeping secularization, he argued that Protestants were uncritically embracing social movements instead of devoting themselves to the church’s unchanging scriptural message. He confronted mainstream Protestant divinity schools, asserting they were preoccupied with “making Christianity relevant” and spending more energy on courses in psychology, sociology and church management than on theology.
Yet, he said, theological training was essential if Christianity was to penetrate “the consciousness of this age.”
Professor Berger held a series of teaching positions at a number of campuses, including Boston University, as well as the New School for Social Research, Brooklyn College, Rutgers University and Boston College.
Peter Ludwig Berger was born on March 17, 1929, in Vienna, the son of George William and the former Jelka Loew. His mother, he recalled, filled him with stories of the glories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire under the Hapsburgs, an upbringing he credited for his generally conservative outlook.
Photo
“A Rumor of Angels” was required reading for years in college sociology and theology courses.
He immigrated to the United States when he was 17, shortly after World War II ended, and enrolled at Wagner College on Staten Island. He graduated in 1949 and did his doctoral work at the New School in Manhattan, where many on the faculty were brilliant émigrés who had escaped Hitler.
He also spent a year as a candidate for the ministry at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia before deciding to abandon the quest. He was reluctant, he later said, to preach the definition of Christian faith strictly according to the Lutheran Confessions. His thinking, he decided, fit best “within the traditions of Protestant liberalism.”
In 1960, after several teaching stints and Army service, he joined the faculty of the Hartford Seminary Foundation. He also wrote, for Doubleday, two critiques of the church as an institution: “The Noise of Solemn Assemblies: Christian Commitment and the Religious Establishment in America,” and “The Precarious Vision: A Sociologist Looks at Social Fictions and Christian Faith,” both published in 1961.
Both books urged a return to a Christian vision rooted in the Bible’s fundamentals and proved popular with younger Christians.
“A Rumor of Angels” enhanced his standing as a theologian. In 1969, the Vatican’s Secretariat for Nonbelievers asked him to organize a conference on secularization for scholars of various religious backgrounds.
Professor Berger collaborated on several books with his wife, Brigitte Berger, herself a prominent sociologist and author. One book looked at how technology and industrialization were breaking down the emotional bonds of community.
The couple met in Germany, where Professor Berger was working for a Protestant research firm after serving in the Army there for two years during World War II. Brigitte Kellner was a student and the daughter of a fiercely anti-Nazi German whom the Russians imprisoned after the war because he was a landowner. She and her mother escaped that fate by jumping off a train that was deporting them. She and Professor Berger met again in New York and married in 1959. She died in 2015.
Besides his son Thomas, Professor Berger is survived by another son, Michael, and two grandchildren.
Another book by him was “The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation.” It urged theologians concerned about declining faith to make “heretical” choices by finding the points of agreement between Christianity and Hinduism and Buddhism. It was nominated for a 1980 National Book Award.
Despite his stature, Professor Berger had some detractors. The Catholic philosopher Michael Novak (who died in February) praised the ideas in “A Rumor of Angels” as provocative but said the book’s tone “is patronizing and its arguments are hurriedly put together.”
Other critics rejected his scolding of Protestant churches for embracing social movements. Discussing “A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity” (1992) in The New York Times Book Review, the author and critic Eleanor Munro said his “argument seems lost in language” and took him to task for his animus toward “theologizing feminists.”
“The text is peppered around the edges with a quantity of neoconservative bigotry,” she wrote.
Before the century was over, Professor Berger confessed that he had erred in asserting that modernity necessarily diminished faith. Except for locales like Western Europe and social groups like intellectuals, most of the world is as religious as ever, he concluded.
The belief in Jesus, he wrote in 1998 in The Christian Century, the journal of liberal Protestantism, might be slumping in mainline churches but was flourishing “in those ‘weak’ places where people are unsure of themselves, groping for a few glimpses of truth to hold onto.”
Professor Berger traveled to countries like India to better appreciate third world cultures and religions other than the Judeo-Christian faiths. Given the power of religions like Islam within their societies, he realized that his fixation with secularization was “ethnocentric.”
The poverty he saw on his excursions also led him to grapple with political ideas, particularly the ideologies aimed at alleviating misery, though he concluded in “Movement and Revolution” (1970), a collection of essays by him and the theologian Richard John Neuhaus, that reform was possible without radical shifts like Marxism.
In another political writing venture, a 1971 article in The New Republic with his wife, he predicted that the newly college-educated children of the largely white lower-middle and working classes would supplant the children of the upper-middle class at the top of a technological society because so many of the more affluent young were counterculture revolutionaries who had rejected the Protestant work ethic.
From: "Chine...@googlegroups.com" <chine...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Yang, Fenggang" <fy...@purdue.edu>
Reply-To: "Chine...@googlegroups.com" <chine...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday, June 29, 2017 at 10:38 AM
To: "Chine...@googlegroups.com" <chine...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [ChineseSSSR] Peter Berger passed away
Late Tuesday evening, June 27, 2017, Peter L. Berger passed away at his home in Brookline. He was 88 years old and was preceded in death in May 2015 by his wife Brigitte Berger. He is survived by his two sons; Thomas is a distinguished Professor of International Relations at Boston University, where Brigitte was Professor Emerita of Sociology, and Peter was Professor Emeritus of Religion, Sociology, and Theology. While his death was somewhat unexpected, it followed a recent illness and hospitalization. A memorial service is anticipated in the early fall.
I first encountered Peter Berger ”on the page.” The pages of The Social Construction of Reality, to be exact. It introduced me – and the entire discipline -- to phenomenological ways of thinking about society, and it has shaped me – and our field -- ever since. Equally important, his theoretical masterpiece, The Sacred Canopy, has been my touchstone for forty years. It has stayed on my grad seminar syllabi, even after he himself admitted that the secularization process he theorized in the second half of the book ended up not being as universally inevitable as he expected. It is nevertheless a masterpiece because it weaves together the best thinking from a century of social theory (the footnotes are amazing!) and shows how religion is and must be part of the picture.
As I was in the midst of writing my dissertation, one of my committee members left Yale, and Kai Erikson suggested that he would ask Peter to be a reader. That’s when the Peter Berger on the page became an imposing and challenging real-life persence. He wrote a gracious and supportive review of my analysis of a Fundamentalist congregation, and I got my degree.
A decade later, an unannounced phone call from Peter ushered in the beginnings of the colleagueship I have cherished since. It was an invitation to undertake a research project that would be headquartered at the Institute on Culture Religion and World Affairs. Being headquartered there meant the beginning of dozens of conversations in the seminar room of 10 Lenox Street, with Peter inevitably at the head of the table. He sometimes referred to that room as his ”living room,” and I do think he truly lived there. A stunning array of intellectual talent has assembled around that table, and dozens of books have been birthed, nurtured, and celebrated there. I am grateful to have been in that company in that place with Peter.
Another decade passed, and my own journey brought me to Boston University, where Peter was among the people who most warmly welcomed me. 10 Lenox Street again became the home for a research project for me, as Peter midwifed a grant proposal through the Templeton Foundation to support the project that became Sacred Stories. Through these years as University colleagues, we served on dissertation committees together and thought together about how to strengthen sociology of religion at BU. Since he retired in 2010, I’ve missed seeing him on a regular basis.
Anyone who knew Peter not only knew his amazing intellect, but also his addiction to humor. He always had a new joke to share and frequently punctuated his theoretical excurses with a vivid story. But even more than humor, Peter was shaped by faith, the kind of faith that is built on skepticism, not certainty. Over the years he wrote almost as much about theological questions as about sociological ones, but his theological work was always deeply informed by his humanistic sociological sensibility. It’s a rare combination, but one I have valued and learned from.
Peter Berger carved out a unique place in the world. A very big unique place. I am grateful that I had the chance to be part of the space he touched.
Nancy Ammerman
June 28, 2018
Boston
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Carsten Vala
Sent on the go
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Peter L. Berger in 2013. He argued that the skepticism of the atheist was just as questionable as blind faith. CreditBerkley Center
Peter L. Berger, an influential, and contrarian, Protestant theologian and sociologist who, in the face of the “God is dead” movement of the 1960s, argued that faith can indeed flourish in modern society if people learn to recognize the transcendent and supernatural in ordinary experiences, died on Tuesday at his home in Brookline, Mass. He was 88.
His death was announced by the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs, which he founded at Boston University in 1985 and directed until 2009. His son Thomas said the cause was heart failure.
Professor Berger, who was born in Austria, was the author of a shelf-full of books. He was known for his work in what is called the sociology of knowledge — understanding how humans experience everyday reality.
One of his two dozen volumes, “The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge,” which he wrote in 1966 with Thomas Luckmann, was honored by the International Sociological Association as one of the 20th century’s five most influential sociology books.
Professor Berger, who had a wry smile and deep-set eyes framed by a balding crown, came to wide attention during the charged debate over whether the concept of a deity was relevant in an increasingly secularized, technological world — a discussion that seemed to peak with a famous 1966 Time magazine cover whose stark red-on-black headline asked, “Is God Dead?”
Theologians like Paul Tillich, Gabriel Vahanian and Thomas J. J. Altizer produced works that, taken together, seemed to argue that post-Auschwitz society, being skeptical of a benevolent universe and absorbed with material gains, was losing its sense of the sacred — so much so that the vision of a transcendent deity had lost much of its force.
Some theologians seemed to reject traditional notions of theism, even arguing that Jesus should be seen more as a human role model than an actual deity.
Professor Berger pushed back against that trend in his book “A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural,” published in 1969 and for many years required reading in college sociology and theology courses.
He argued that the skepticism of the atheist was just as questionable as blind faith, though he conceded that secularism was on the rise — that cultural relevance had overtaken spiritual values.
“Whatever the situation may have been in the past,” he wrote, “today the supernatural as a meaningful reality is absent or remote from the horizons of everyday life of large numbers, very probably the majority, of people in modern societies, who seem to manage to get along without it quite well.”
Nevertheless, he wrote, people can enrich their religious sensibilities by finding “signals of transcendence” in common experiences: A mother’s reassuring a frightened child that all is well suggests a confidence in a trustworthy universe. A mortal’s insistence on hope in the face of approaching death implies a conviction that death may not be final. The ability to condemn monstrous evil suggests a belief in a moral ordering of the universe that may even be comfortable with the notion of hell. Laughter and play affirm “the triumph of all human gestures of creative beauty over the gestures of destruction.”
In a later book, Professor Berger recounted his own religious discovery that there was an “otherness which lurks behind the fragile structures of everyday life.”
Addressing his concern with creeping secularization, he argued that Protestants were uncritically embracing social movements instead of devoting themselves to the church’s unchanging scriptural message. He confronted mainstream Protestant divinity schools, asserting they were preoccupied with “making Christianity relevant” and spending more energy on courses in psychology, sociology and church management than on theology.
Yet, he said, theological training was essential if Christianity was to penetrate “the consciousness of this age.”
Professor Berger held a series of teaching positions at a number of campuses, including Boston University, as well as the New School for Social Research, Brooklyn College, Rutgers University and Boston College.
Peter Ludwig Berger was born on March 17, 1929, in Vienna, the son of George William and the former Jelka Loew. His mother, he recalled, filled him with stories of the glories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire under the Hapsburgs, an upbringing he credited for his generally conservative outlook.
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“A Rumor of Angels” was required reading for years in college sociology and theology courses.
He immigrated to the United States when he was 17, shortly after World War II ended, and enrolled at Wagner College on Staten Island. He graduated in 1949 and did his doctoral work at the New School in Manhattan, where many on the faculty were brilliant émigrés who had escaped Hitler.
He also spent a year as a candidate for the ministry at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia before deciding to abandon the quest. He was reluctant, he later said, to preach the definition of Christian faith strictly according to the Lutheran Confessions. His thinking, he decided, fit best “within the traditions of Protestant liberalism.”
In 1960, after several teaching stints and Army service, he joined the faculty of the Hartford Seminary Foundation. He also wrote, for Doubleday, two critiques of the church as an institution: “The Noise of Solemn Assemblies: Christian Commitment and the Religious Establishment in America,” and “The Precarious Vision: A Sociologist Looks at Social Fictions and Christian Faith,” both published in 1961.
Both books urged a return to a Christian vision rooted in the Bible’s fundamentals and proved popular with younger Christians.
“A Rumor of Angels” enhanced his standing as a theologian. In 1969, the Vatican’s Secretariat for Nonbelievers asked him to organize a conference on secularization for scholars of various religious backgrounds.
Professor Berger collaborated on several books with his wife, Brigitte Berger, herself a prominent sociologist and author. One book looked at how technology and industrialization were breaking down the emotional bonds of community.
The couple met in Germany, where Professor Berger was working for a Protestant research firm after serving in the Army there for two years during World War II. Brigitte Kellner was a student and the daughter of a fiercely anti-Nazi German whom the Russians imprisoned after the war because he was a landowner. She and her mother escaped that fate by jumping off a train that was deporting them. She and Professor Berger met again in New York and married in 1959. She died in 2015.
Besides his son Thomas, Professor Berger is survived by another son, Michael, and two grandchildren.
Another book by him was “The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation.” It urged theologians concerned about declining faith to make “heretical” choices by finding the points of agreement between Christianity and Hinduism and Buddhism. It was nominated for a 1980 National Book Award.
Despite his stature, Professor Berger had some detractors. The Catholic philosopher Michael Novak (who died in February) praised the ideas in “A Rumor of Angels” as provocative but said the book’s tone “is patronizing and its arguments are hurriedly put together.”
Other critics rejected his scolding of Protestant churches for embracing social movements. Discussing “A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity” (1992) in The New York Times Book Review, the author and critic Eleanor Munro said his “argument seems lost in language” and took him to task for his animus toward “theologizing feminists.”
“The text is peppered around the edges with a quantity of neoconservative bigotry,” she wrote.
Before the century was over, Professor Berger confessed that he had erred in asserting that modernity necessarily diminished faith. Except for locales like Western Europe and social groups like intellectuals, most of the world is as religious as ever, he concluded.
The belief in Jesus, he wrote in 1998 in The Christian Century, the journal of liberal Protestantism, might be slumping in mainline churches but was flourishing “in those ‘weak’ places where people are unsure of themselves, groping for a few glimpses of truth to hold onto.”
Professor Berger traveled to countries like India to better appreciate third world cultures and religions other than the Judeo-Christian faiths. Given the power of religions like Islam within their societies, he realized that his fixation with secularization was “ethnocentric.”
The poverty he saw on his excursions also led him to grapple with political ideas, particularly the ideologies aimed at alleviating misery, though he concluded in “Movement and Revolution” (1970), a collection of essays by him and the theologian Richard John Neuhaus, that reform was possible without radical shifts like Marxism.
In another political writing venture, a 1971 article in The New Republic with his wife, he predicted that the newly college-educated children of the largely white lower-middle and working classes would supplant the children of the upper-middle class at the top of a technological society because so many of the more affluent young were counterculture revolutionaries who had rejected the Protestant work ethic.
From: "Chine...@googlegroups.com" <chine...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Yang, Fenggang" <fy...@purdue.edu>
Reply-To: "Chine...@googlegroups.com" <chine...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Thursday, June 29, 2017 at 10:38 AM
To: "Chine...@googlegroups.com" <chine...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [ChineseSSSR] Peter Berger passed away