Skip to Content
  • Browse
  • Past Issues
  • Search

Arts and Letters

Wagner History

Wagner News

Inside Sports

Alumni Stories

Obituaries

Alumni Events

From the President

Feature Stories
Winter 2022
Winter 2021
Fall 2021
Summer 2019
Winter 2018–19
Summer 2018
Fall 2017
Summer 2017
Fall 2016
Winter 2015-16
Summer 2015
Fall 2014
Winter 2013-14
Summer 2013
Fall 2012
Summer 2012
Fall 2011
Summer 2011
Fall 2010
Summer 2010
Fall 2009
Summer 2009
Fall 2008
Summer 2008

History Makers: Peter Berger ’49 H’73

SHARE
PRINT
BACK TO TOP
History Makers: Peter Berger ’49 H’73

Wagner philosophy major became ‘one of the greatest sociologists of religion and modernity’

A black-and-white portrait of Donald Spiro
He Decided to Make a Difference
Thomas Kendris, dressed in a suit and tie.
Thomas Kendris ’78: Leader in Health Care Innovation

In the years following World War II, Wagner’s enrollment swelled as veterans returned to college en masse on the GI Bill®.

Amidst those who had fought the Nazis, there were also a couple of students who had escaped becoming the regime’s victims. One of them was Peter Berger ’49 H’73.

In a black-and-white photo, Peter Berger ’49 receives an honorary degree from President Arthur O. Davidson, while Trustee Andrew G. Clauson Jr. looks on.
During Faith and Life Week in March 1973, Peter Berger ’49 receives an honorary degree from President Arthur O. Davidson, while Trustee Andrew G. Clauson Jr. looks on.

Peter Berger was born in 1929 in Vienna. His parents, Jewish converts to Christianity, fled Vienna in 1938 upon the Anschluss, or annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany. They spent the following years in Palestine, then under British control, and immigrated to the U.S. in 1947.

By 1949, at age 20, Peter Berger had already attained his B.A. in philosophy from Wagner College. “It was part of his becoming integrated into American society,” says his son, Thomas Berger, a professor of international relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University.

Howard Braren ’50 H’12 remembers Peter Berger as a quiet, studious young man who lived down the hall from him in the dorm (today’s Reynolds House). Berger’s roommate was Friedrich “Fred” Katz ’49, a fellow Austrian Jewish émigré who also had an intellectual bent. Another friend at Wagner was Paul Edward Hoffman ’49.

Katz, who died in 2010, became a distinguished historian at the University of Chicago. Berger writes in his memoir, Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist, that he was “inspired by religious fervor” and “wanted to become a Lutheran minister.” He went to the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, a path often trod by Wagner graduates; but after a year, Berger decided theology school was not the right choice for him.

He switched to sociology, earning a Ph.D. from the New School for Social Research. It was there that he found his intellectual home and launched a brilliant career as a professor, scholar, and writer.

Peter Berger died this year on June 27, at age 88. The New York Times called him “an influential, and contrarian, Protestant theologian and sociologist who, in the face of the ‘God is dead’ movement of the 1960s, argued that faith can indeed flourish in modern society.”

Berger’s most famous work on this topic was A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural, published in 1969. Berger returned to Wagner in March 1973 to speak about “Religion and Political Language in America Today” as part of Faith and Life Week, an annual tradition at the College for many years. The College awarded him an honorary doctorate at that time.

Berger was also noted for his work on the sociology of knowledge. His 1966 book The Social Construction of Reality, co-written with Thomas Luckmann, was translated into more than 20 languages. The International Sociological Association ranked it No. 5 among the 20th century’s most influential sociology works.

Berger wrote many more books. He retired as a professor emeritus at Boston University, where he founded the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA) in 1985. His longtime colleague Robert Hefner, who followed him as the CURA director, says that Berger “will be remembered as one of the greatest sociologists of religion and modernity in the period stretching from the late 1950s to today.”

Fall 2017

  • Alumni Stories
  • Obituaries
  • philosophy
  • religion
SHARE
PRINT

Related Stories

image description

Called for Such a Time as This

Mar 12, 2021 How does a Puerto Rican girl with bad grades, raised in the Pentecostal church, become the first woman, and the first person of color, elect
image description

A Corporate Lawyer with a Heart for Social Justice

Mar 13, 2019 “I think employers want to see that you can do work and are not just book smart,” says Julia Zenker ’14.
image description

(Ad)Dressing Wonder Woman

Dec 06, 2017 A philosophy professor and senior major apply their tools of analysis to a pop-culture summer blockbuster.
CLASS NOTES
OBITUARIES
CONTACT US

LATEST NEWS

image description

Pride Collection comes to Horrmann Library

The Horrmann Library is the home of a unique collection of over 2,000 titles on …

image description

Yuliya Johnson: Global Health Guardian

Alumna Yuliya Johnson helps keep her adopted country safe from pandemics, bioterrorism.
by Tim O’Bryhim

image description

Chris Cappelli: Global Health Guardian

If nothing happens, it means alumnus Chris Cappelli has done his job right.
by Tim O’Bryhim

image description

President Araimo makes Staten Island Power 100

City & State N.Y., a magazine dedicated to New York’s local and state politics and …

  • About the Magazine
  • Give to Wagner
  • Wagner Newsroom
  • Wagner Home
FOLLOW US

© 2025 All Rights Reserved