The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation

by Peter L. Berger

Book Overview

How does one establish a reputation in sociology of religion? Berger;s Rumor of Angels and the present Heretical Imperative show the way to well-deserved prominent leadership in grounded, breakthrough... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385159676
• ISBN13: 9780385159678
• Release Date: January 1980
• Publisher: Doubleday Books
• Length: 220 Pages
• Weight: 0.32 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Heretical Imperative

I have not yet begun to read the book but it was the fastest delivery I have ever seen.

Well informed intellectual religious thought

The first edition of The Heretical Imperative by Peter L. Berger appeared in 1979 and I do not have a more recent version. Chapter 1, Modernity as the Universalization of Heresy, attempts to define the modern situation. Fate used to determine lives. Now so many people respond to questionnaires that every nervous Prometheus is not only sure to be outvoted, but any question could become the Copernican revolution about which the future is made to revolve for as long as no one dares to agree about anything else. Copernicus is the individual each of us is due to be compared with. "As an analogy, even if one could demonstrate that Copernicus was an absolute fool with regard to the social realities of his day, this demonstration would not strengthen the theory that the earth is flat and that the sun moves around it." (p. 144). People are subject to dynamic cycles, and students of humor are likely to think that the major difference between people is that they know different jokes. This book was written in years in which war and religion were considered different kinds of experience, and war, in particular, was even subject to multiple interpretations from a religious point of view. "Thus the alleged moral teachings of Christianity may be abstinence from extramarital sex or universal tolerance for all expressions of sexuality, total pacifism or self-sacrifice in just wars, racial . . . and so on almost ad infinitum." (p. 115). Surely there are polls to establish how well the people who claim religious views of one kind or another also adhere to a variety of ethical positions. The present is a time when participants in war might even be quizzed on how well the Crusades are going right down to the day, hour, and minute in which journalists who have been hit turn to the camera and proclaim, "I'm dying." It turns out this book approaches that experience. "Life has never been the same for me since the death of my mother." (p. 40). Societies have similar experiences, and it is not uncommon for intellectuals to mix up one experience with something quite different. For example, Germany was winning territory in Russia and France in World War I, while enduring some starvation, before the American troops attacked the German lines at a few places in France. Asking for an armistice then was hardly like being conquered by the Allied armies in 1945, but this book reports: "This safe world collapsed once and for all in that war, which may well be described as the collective suicide of European civilization. What is more, the fact of this collapse did not take long to sink in. It was visible right away, starkly and frighteningly, as were its moral and intellectual consequences. Not surprisingly, this was especially so in central Europe, dominated by that German culture that was now linked to a nation that had been catastrophically defeated." (p. 71). Many other defeats in the twentieth century were as mild: the United States in Cuba in 1961, and s