Word: bergeres
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...Lutheran layman and professor of sociology at Manhattan's New School for Social Research, Berger has already used the tools of his discipline to challenge the bureaucratic pretensions of institutional religion in two books, The Noise of Solemn Assemblies and The Precarious Vision. He readily admits that sociology has helped to undermine the traditional faiths of the past, but he also argues that it can just as easily undermine the certainty of today's aggressive disbelief. Disbelief, he insists, is largely the product of man's present environment, and the skepticism of the professional atheist is just...
...book called A Rumor of Angels (Doubleday; $4.50), Peter L. Berger, perhaps the leading U.S. sociologist of religion, suggests that the very scientific methods that have helped to challenge traditional belief in the world of the spirit can be the starting point for a new and better faith...
Looking to Man. Thus freed, men can look to their own experience for the "signals of transcendence" that Berger believes form the best foundation for an "inductive faith" in the supernatural. Without touching on individual experiences of the esoteric - such phenomena as mysticism and private revelation - Berger finds these signals (the "angels" of his title) in experiences that are "generally accessible to all men." In a modern parallel to Thomas Aquinas' classic proofs for God's existence, Berger proposes five common experiences that seem to argue for the transcendent. The arguments...
...FROM ORDERING. When a child cries in the unfamiliar night, a mother's first impulse is to reassure the child that "everything is all right." Unless the statement is a lie, says Berger, at its root it expresses humanity's basic confidence in a reality that transcends the natural, often cruel world - "a universe that is ultimately in order and ultimately trust worthy...
...FROM PLAY. Both children and adults, says Berger, find "liberation and peace" in play. Why? Because "in playing, one steps out of one time into another," temporarily halting, in a way that suggests eternity, a world in which death occurs. Thus, the Vienna Philharmonic could give a concert as Soviet troops be sieged the city in 1945: "an affirmation of the ultimate triumph of all human gestures of creative beauty over the gestures of destruction...