Professor of Sociology and Theology at Boston University
Abstract
What follows is a lecture given by one of the prominent contemporary sociologists of religion, who has a great many works on this subject. In this writing, Peter L. Berger is concerned to explain the status of the sociology of religion nowadays, and discuss its challenges and related topics. Berger, who is himself one of the critics of the theory of secularization, in this lecture makes some important considerations, which can provide a general framework for this discipline. Considering the theory of secularization and its relationship with modernism, he emphasizes that with the coming of the sociology of religion and its emphasis upon empirical evidence, the theory of secularization and also secularism were doubted; and these theories could not explain some events, which occurred in some countries.