Peter Berger, who died on June 27 at age eighty-eight, ranked among the most distinguished sociological thinkers and public intellectuals of the past half century. His contributions to his discipline were impressively varied: the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, sociological theory, and the cultural effects of modernization. In 1998 the International Sociological Association voted the book he coauthored with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (1966), one of the five most influential works in the field in the twentieth century. That volume, along with four other notable books written in a burst of creative energy while he was still in his thirties—The Noise of Solemn Assemblies (1961), Invitation to Sociology (1963), The Sacred Canopy (1967), A Rumor of Angels (1969)—made him the best-known sociologist of his era.
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