On Friday, TGC carried my review of Peter Berger’s new book, The Many Altars of Modernity. I really cannot overstate how important I think this book could be:

In his 1967 book The Sacred Canopy, Peter Berger more or less invented sociology of religion as we know it. It revolutionized the field not only because it was profound, but because it was short and did not assume much prior knowledge. It was not beach reading, but laypeople willing to make the effort could grasp the extraordinary vision Berger laid out for how we can understand the central role of religion in the structure of society.

Berger, professor emeritus of sociology at Boston University, has done it again. The Many Altars of Modernity is even shorter (93 pages) and more accessible to the layperson than The Sacred Canopy. Yet it has the potential to re-revolutionize the sociology of religion.

Berger has provided a concise statement of the sources, opportunities and challenges of modernity that I think surpasses anything we’ve seen so far – certainly anything we’ve seen written for general intellectual audiences. He identifies the multiple dimensions of the problem and shows where the prevailing approaches to the problem are inadequate.

The word we most need to hear, I think, is this:

Against Taylor and the dominant traditionalism of the Christian intellectual world, Berger argues that the real origins of modernity—and hence of the crises of modernity—are in the religions themselves, and the sociology of their encounter with one another. Once the world’s great civilizations made the transition from primordial mythology to mature religions, capable both of making truth claims and of accommodating economic and technological advances, it was inevitable that we would someday face the challenge of pluralism. We can denounce “modern ideas” until we are blue in the face, but once adherents of the world’s religions start interacting with each other on a daily basis, we cannot avoid the trauma of choice and doubt. The great historic encounter cannot be undone.

Unfortunately, the publisher has set the cover price high. Check with your local college library and make sure they plan to order this book; you won’t want to miss it.