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

政治自由主义 = Political liberalism

American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us

Like any other phenomenon of a society religion is a multidimensional phenomenon. Basically speaking, religion testifies to man's " sensus numinis " (Rudolf Otto, Joachim Wach) or whatever one may call it. It answers man's need and fascination for the mysterious and unfathomable of life and death. In addition, religion has other dimensions, social, psychological, philosophical etc., that call for corresponding approaches. The sociological approach takes into account a given social structure as the normative field (role-status) of interaction of actors (individuals or groups). If we define a perfect society as a society which is structurally fully integrated --which is not necessarily the only possible definition no existing society is perfect. In other words, any society exhibits unstructured situations or topoi which are outside the possibility of our making rational predictions with a sufficient degree of validity to serve as reliable guide lines for our lives. There exist always blanks or normative gaps, lacunae as well as discrepancies between institutionally legitimized expectations (in terms of the commonly shared value system of a given society)

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Religion in Sociological Perspective

The Churching of America, 1776-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy.

This article presents an alternative account of comparative trajectories of secularization and religious change in Europe and America. Building on (1) ‘supply-side,’ (2) neo-orthodox secularization, and (3) historicist schools, the authors develop a synthetic explanatory framework which emphasizes changed conditions of religious belonging amid the transition to modernity. Modernization, they suggest, disrupted older, parochialized forms of religious community which emerged in the Middle Ages. The authors describe the rise and diffusion of newer, de-parochialized forms of religious belonging and organization in the 18th and 19th centuries and stress their comparative compatibility with modernity; here the authors draw special attention to the impact of missionary organizational schemas derived in colonial environments and re-purposed for domestic evangelism. They argue that mass unchurching was positively related to the persistence of parochialism and negatively related to the spread of post-parochialism. ...

Samuel Nelson

Papers

Conditions of religious belonging: Confessionalization, de-parochialization, and the Euro-American divergence: