Defunct Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Miscellaneous Other Peter Ludwig Berger[a] (17 March 1929 – 27 June 2017) was an Austrian-born American sociologist and Protestant theologian.

Berger is arguably best known for his book, co-authored with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York, 1966), which is considered one of the most influential texts in the sociology of knowledge and played a central role in the development of social constructionism.

[6] On September 28, 1959, he married Brigitte Kellner, herself an eminent sociologist who was on the faculty at Wellesley College and Boston University where she was the chair of the sociology department at both schools.

Thomas is himself a scholar of international relations, now a Professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and author of War, Guilt and World Politics After World War II (2012) and Cultures of Antimilitarism: National Security in Germany and Japan (2003).

Following the German bombings of Haifa, he was evacuated to Mount Carmel, where he developed his life-long interest in religion.

[9] Berger attended Wagner College for his Bachelor of Arts and received his MA and PhD from the New School for Social Research in New York in 1954.

Some of the questions it attempts to answer are: How do religion and values affect political, economic, and public ethical developments around the world?

Defying earlier forecasts, why have religious actors and ideas become more rather than less globally powerful in recent years?

and In a world of increasing religious and ethical diversity, what are the implications of the revival of public religion for citizenship, democracy, and civil coexistence?

[12] Berger was a moderate Christian Lutheran conservative whose work in theology, secularization, and modernity at times has challenged the views of contemporary mainstream sociology, which[clarification needed] tends to lean away from any right-wing political thinking.

Everyday life contrasts with other spheres of reality – dreamworlds, theatre – and is considered by a person to be objective, intersubjective (shared with others) and self-evident.

Humans perceive the other in these interactions as more real than they would themselves; we can place a person in everyday life by seeing them, yet we need to contemplate our own placement in the world, as it is not so concrete.

The process of building a socially-constructed reality takes place in three phases: Subjectively, we experience first and second socializations into society.

[17] Berger and Luckmann see socialization as very powerful and able to influence things such as sexual and nutritional choices.

Research should be accrued in the same manner as the scientific method, using observation, hypothesis, testing, data, analysis and generalization.

The meaning derived from the results of research should be contextualized with historical, cultural, environmental, or other important data.

This is upheld through legitimacy, either giving special meaning to these behaviors or by creating a structure of knowledge that enhances the plausibility of the nomos.

There is no plausibility structure for any system of beliefs in the modern world; people are made to choose their own with no anchors to our own perceptions of reality.

The socialist myth, a non-pejorative term of Berger's, actually arises from intellectual leftism masking a need to resolve the lacking sense of community in the modern world through the promise to destroy the oppression of capitalism.

Human existence in the age of modernity requires there to be structures like church, neighbourhood, and family to help establish a sense of belonging rooted in a commitment to values or beliefs.

Lastly, pluralism influences individual believers and religious communities to define the core of their faith separately from its less central elements.

This allows people to pick and choose between certain aspects of their chosen form of belief - that they may or may not agree with - while still remaining true to the central parts of it.

People who choose to believe in the existence of a supernatural other require faith – a wager of belief against doubt – in the modern rationalised world.

[24] He has admitted to his own miscalculations about secularization, concluding that the existence of resurgent religiosity in the modernised world has proven otherwise.

Berger finds that his and most sociologists' misconsensus about secularization may have been the result of their own bias as members of academia, which is a largely atheist concentration of people.

Berger's theories on religion have held considerable weight in contemporary neoconservative and theological fields of thinking, however.

Therefore, much of the empirical work of Berger and Weber have revolved around the relationship between modern rationalization and options for social action.

The connection between Berger's analysis of the sociology of religion in modern society and Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism aligns.

Weber saw capitalism as a result of the Protestant secularization of work ethic and morality in amassing wealth, which Berger integrates into his analysis about the effects of losing the non-secular foundations for belief about life's ultimate meaning.

Berger's own experiences teaching in North Carolina in the 1950s showed the shocking American prejudice of that era's Southern culture and influenced his humanistic perspective as a way to reveal the ideological forces from which it stemmed.