Peter Berger (1929) is an American sociologist best known for his collaboration with Thomas Luckman in writing The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. That book argues that human reality, and knowledge of it, is a social construct, emerging from the individual or group’s interaction with larger social structures (institutions). Social structures, once widely adopted, lose their history as social constructions (objectivation), and come over time, by the people who live within them, to be deemed natural realities independent of human construction (reification). Berger predicted, in his later book, The Sacred Canopy, near-term all-encompassing secularization of religion, which prediction has proved false, especially in the third world (as Berger himself has acknowledged in his later work, Desecularization).

神圣的帷幕 : 宗教社会学理论之要素 = The sacred canopy elements of a sociological theory of religion

Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity

Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God's Invisibility in Medieval Art

On secularization: Towards a revised general theory

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The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change.

Scholarly surveys of the medieval Magdalene tend to conclude at the opening of the sixteenth century, dismissing any role she may have had in the teaching of Protestant reformers. Protestant and Catholic attitudes towards sanctity and sainthood have been the object of scholarly work, but my dissertation is the first comparative examination of the different confessions’ uses of the Magdalene tradition through the early modern period. Mary Magdalene was of one of several scriptural women to whom Protestants in Germany, France, Switzerland, and England referred in debating the legitimacy of female and lay preaching. Lutheran and Reformed pastors, Anabaptists, and Quakers all adapted the medieval Magdalene tradition to advance Evangelical theologies of the forgiveness of sins, the sacraments, and the priesthood of all believers. Early modern women also seized on these possibilities, claiming for themselves the Magdalene’s title as preacher and devoted disciple of the Word. The Catholic cult of the Magdalene shifted as well, serving the needs of the Catholic Reformation. In reaction to the Protestant specter of lay and female preaching, male authors in their sermons and devotional work set aside earlier descriptions of the Magdalene as “apostle to the apostles” and emphasized instead her identity as a penitent

Margaret Lois Arnold

Papers

Mary Magdalene in the era of Reformation