The Many Altars of Modernity

Response by Detlef Pollack: Toward a New Paradigm for the Sociology of Religion?

Translated from the German by Ruth Pauli

 

Peter L. Berger is one of the few sociologists of religion in our time who has not only made contributions at the highest level of scientific discourse, but who, during the past decades, has also codetermined its profile to a high degree. His religious-sociological oeuvre of the 1960s and 1970s set the tone for the then-predominant approach the secularization theory. To this day, some exponents of the secularization theory, such as Steve Bruce or Frank Lechner, are influenced by him. All work done since then in the field of sociology of religion has been strongly affected by his thesis that religious concepts and practices ...