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August 2nd, 2010
02:01 PM ET
Peter Berger in Blogostan
By Stephen Prothero, Special to CNN Peter Berger is perhaps the most influential living scholar of religion, the author of such classics (and bestsellers) as The Sacred Canopy and The Social Construction of Reality. As of a few weeks ago, he is also a blogger, the man behind "Religion and Other Curiosities" at American Interest Online. I had the pleasure of getting to know Berger a bit after taking a job a decade or so ago at Boston University, where until his recent retirement (of sorts) he directed BU's Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs and held forth as a professor of religion, sociology and theology. So I am happy to report that Berger the Blogger is not only smart but also funny and self-deprecating, as the first sentences of his first post intimate:
So far this caveman is flying his airliner quite well, outing himself as a “Godder” ("a theologically very liberal Lutheran") and parachuting into topics as various as Pentecostalism in Brazil, secularity and ultra-orthodoxy in Israel, homosexuality in the Anglican communion, the sex abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church in Belgium, Max-Weber-style “value free” sociology, and (a special interest of his) religious humor. I am tempted to groan at a few of his jokes (not all of them good), but I’ll highlight instead his early rant against the mistreatment of religion in academia and the media. Berger has long observed (correctly, in my view) that while the United States is extraordinarily religious place its journalists and professors are extraordinarily secularized. As a result, he writes:
University professors and magazine writers "have every right to be secularists," Berger concludes, "but they should bracket their personal beliefs when they try to understand reality—as should 'Godders' like me." The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Stephen Prothero. |
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The CNN Belief Blog covers the faith angles of the day's biggest stories, from breaking news to politics to entertainment, fostering a global conversation about the role of religion and belief in readers' lives. It's edited by CNN's Daniel Burke with contributions from Eric Marrapodi and CNN's worldwide news gathering team. |
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prothero,
typical liberal view – completely out of touch with reality – if the founders of this mosque had any taste they would leave this site alone, and the people murdered by their often fanatical faith to rest in peace – liberals and their complete elitist views such as prothero will bring down this country
Don't we all just love the mumbo-jumbo of "theology speak"!!
e.g. Peter Berger has attempted to develop an account of the relationship between social structure and human agency that navigates a middle way between voluntarism and determinism. Berger’s approach has been criticised by social theorists for reproducing, rather than transcending, the very errors of voluntarism and determinism that he strives to avoid. However, the critics have focused on Berger’s explicit, meta-theoretical pronouncements about the nature or ontology of the social world, whilst ignoring the more sophisticated account of the structure agency relationship that is implicit in, and presupposed by, his substantive sociological research. The notions of ‘emergence’ and ‘emergent properties’ are used to develop an account of the structure-agency relationship that is consistent with Berger’s concrete sociological work, whilst avoiding the shortcomings of his explicit reflections about the nature of the social world.