Tony Carnes, publisher and editor of A Journey through NYC religions
One of the reasons I came to the New School for Social Research is that I was intrigued by what Peter Berger’s phenomenological sociology might have to offer a Christian in sociology. Although I knew that he wrote liberally about religion, I was more interested in his sociological theory. But I missed ever meeting Berger at the New School. By the time I had arrived he had left after losing a bruising battle in the department. I heard that he had a particular conflict with Art Vidich and that he was power-hungry. I never knew the whole story, but Berger left for Rutgers.
Berger discovered sociology at the New School as a way of learning about American society before he went onto a Lutheran seminary. His very first course was with a Messianic Jew named Albert Salomon. The professor won Berger over to sociology.
The course that Berger took with Salomon was on “Balzac as a sociologist.” Solomon’s take of Balzac was that the novelist was like our Journey reporters. “Salomon presented him: walking the streets of Paris…in quest of its secrets – trying to understand everything that went on in the city’s salons, government offices, businesses, taverns, and brothels.” “It was also a very plausible pedagogical idea,” Berger observed about the course. “Balzac had intended for his collection of novels, The Human Comedy, to provide a comprehensive picture of French society in the 19th Century.”
Salomon ascribed to Balzac “an endless curiosity about every aspect of human behavior, especially those aspects that are normally hidden from view and denied in polite circles.” Like religion, I would add.
Berger hung on his wall a humorous cartoon of Balzac as a monkish figure leering at the world.
Like Salomon, Berger was a Jew who had become a Christian. He was born in 1929 in Vienna. Berger’s parents were Jewish converts to Christianity but still had to flee Vienna in 1938 upon the Anschluss, or annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany. They spent the following years in Palestine, then under British control, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1947. Berger went to Wagner College (from which the info in this paragraph comes) for his undergraduate degree.
After getting his master’s, Berger went to Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia for a year. It is interesting that the same seminary has produced a Balzacian walk through the religions on one street.
Berger decided that he didn’t fit the world as a Lutheran pastor, so he became a sociologist. He took his Ph.D. from New School.
Nancy Ammerman, professor of sociology, Boston University
Late Tuesday evening on 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.
Peter Berger on “How To Make God Laugh” from The American Interest
In Ashkenazi Jewish culture much wisdom and (often irreverent) humor is conveyed by the antiphony of the Hebrew and Yiddish languages—the first carrying the enormous solemnity of Torah, its sacred words antedating the creation of the universe—the latter an idiom of common sense, often employed by women and others of lesser education. For example, there is this Yiddish joke: “How can you make God laugh?” – “Tell him your plans!”
Peter Berger on Sven the homicidal maniac from First Things:
Richard [J. Neuhas, the founder of First Things] used to put up cartoons in his bathroom. One, which stayed there for some time, showed a Viking ship arriving on a beach where people were dancing and waving in welcome. The caption read: “They think that we are still sailing with Olaf the Good. Little do they know that we are now with Sven, the homicidal maniac.”
I met Neuhaus in New York in 1967, and I moved to Boston in 1979. The intervening years saw our most intensive interaction. We both lived in Brooklyn, about a fifteen-minute drive from each other. My wife Brigitte and our two young sons had just moved into a rather dilapidated brownstone in the Cobble Hill section, while Richard lived in Williamsburg, where he was the pastor of a predominantly black Lutheran church. Brigitte was then, as she is now, a sophisticated conversationalist as well as a superb cook; Richard came over for supper at least once a week. We spent many evenings talking about every subject under the sun, sometimes just the three of us, sometimes with other guests. We were in our thirties, the world seemed wide open, and we were quite sure that we were indeed sailing with Olaf the Good. …
Movement and Revolution defined [how far we had moved] … from the left. This was much more upsetting for Richard than for me. Some of his old friends called him a fascist, and this hurt him. In one conversation about this he characteristically shrugged off the insult with a joke: “Okay. So I’ll be a fascist. But I’ll be a jolly fascist!”
One of Richard’s most characteristic traits was his optimism. He once joked that the inscription on his tombstone should read “We’re gonna turn this around yet!” Come to think of it, this sentence contains the core promise of the gospel: “Christ is risen!”—“This has been turned around!”
George Weigel, National Review
I read a lot of Berger in college — Invitation to Sociology, The Social Construction of Reality, Movement and Revolution (co-authored with Neuhaus, then in his rabble-rouser-radical period), and A Rumor of Angels; the last, with its intriguing analysis of how everyday life sends out “signals of transcendence” that can open us to religious faith (or simply to a less-flattened, more capacious worldview) is a small work of genius on which I still rely in lectures today, some four decades later. …
Peter Berger had a remarkable gift for intellectual curiosity and an admirable willingness to admit that he was, on occasion, wrong. Thus the man who was once at the forefront of secularization theory (the claim that modernization inevitably involves radical and deep secularization) later came to admit that he’d had it wrong — and, indeed, that the secularization hypothesis had been empirically falsified everywhere in a world that was becoming more, not less, intensely religious, except for that outlier known as Western Europe. The American experience of hyper-modernization combined with intense religiosity had something to do with Peter’s change of mind on this point and led him to coin the immortal epigram, “The United States is a nation of Indians [the most intensely religious nation on earth] ruled by an elite of Swedes [the world’s most secular nation].”
Michael Lindsay, president, Gordon College in Christianity Today
It was Berger’s fascination with religion that made him and his work so significant to evangelical Christians. He called himself an “incurable Lutheran,” and his liberal Protestant theology might have placed him at odds with many evangelical leaders 100 years ago. But in our increasingly pluralistic world, Berger’s sympathetic treatment of spirituality and faith made him something of a rock star among Christ-following academics. …
A prolific scholar, Berger influenced many Christian thinkers—among them Os Guinness, Richard Mouw, and his former graduate student James Davison Hunter.
Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky
Peter Berger, perhaps the most influential social thinker of our times, has died. One of the individuals I cite most frequently.
— Albert Mohler (@albertmohler) June 29, 2017
Adam Garfinkle, founding editor, The American Interest
Usually upon receiving news of a death, I do not weep unless the deceased is a close relative, a dear friend, a teacher, or either a great musician or a comedian. That’s just the way I am. When I heard of Peter Berger’s passing on Tuesday’s night, I wept. He qualified thrice: as a friend, a teacher, and as a comedian.
Peter Berger (along with the late Thomas Luckmann) changed my life. When I read The Social Construction of Reality early in my graduate school career—it was probably around 1973 or so—a shiver of inner recognition went up my spine. Not many books do that to a person in a lifetime, so you tend to remember the ones that do.
The phenomenological approach seated in The Social Construction of Reality taught me a new way to understand the relationship between me as an active perceiver and the world—natural and social—being perceived. It hit me around page forty or so: an ontological bombshell.
Joseph Berger, The New York Times
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. …
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.
Richard Cimino, sociologist
R.I.P. Peter Berger– a great sociologist (and theologian). Still remember the time he visited the New School and asked us to join him in Union Square as he smoked and told jokes about almost every country in the world.
John Schmalzbauer, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Missouri State University
Berger, Bellah, and Greeley got me hooked on the sociology of religion. Now they are all gone. pic.twitter.com/JRMuRNqtDX
— John Schmalzbauer (@OzarksWatcher) June 30, 2017
Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center posted last night Berger’s talk and discussion: “Six Decades as a Worldwide Religion Watcher: Observations and Lessons Learned“
Jerry Park, associate professor of sociology, Baylor University
My introduction to graduate school in sociology began in part with Peter Berger’s Sacred Canopy and Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life. One was so rich in the fewest of words and the other went at great length to make similar important insights. Berger’s works have inspired more than 50 years of sociologists who study religion, morality, and culture to name a few. Meeting him in person was (for me) a scholar-celebrity moment. Sharing a meal with him while he was a visiting scholar in Baylor’s sociology department and hearing his sense of humor helped to humanize someone who I only knew through his writing. RIP Dr. Berger, and thank you for inspiring us to be critical and humble scholars of society and the sacred.
Jeffrey Goldfarb, professor of sociology, New School for Social Research — “Peter Berger’s Last Visit to The New School for Social Research Revisiting The Social Construction of Reality”
The great sociologist Peter Berger is dead. Thoughtful people mourn. …
Berger and Luckmann are among The New School’s most distinguished alumni. Their book is one of the most important in 20th century sociology, presenting the distinctive New School contribution to the social sciences — historically aware and informed, philosophical grounded in phenomenology, and sociologically inspired by a unique combination of Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Mead. …
On a personal note, I would like to acknowledge that it is thanks to Berger that I am a sociologist, like many others of my generation. In 1963, he published his elegant and seductive Invitation to Sociology, still the most original piece of disciplinary propaganda in our field. In 1967, I read it and the rest is my biography, if not history, for better and for worse.
In 2015 at a Veritas Forum at Harvard Divinity School with Russ Douthat of the New York Times and Kristen Lucken of Brandeis University, Peter Berger commented on the question of the resurrection of Jesus Christ:
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