A Rumor of Angels Quotes

“A few years ago, a priest working in a slum section of a European city was asked why he was doing it, and replied, 'So that the rumor of God may not completely disappear.”
― Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural

“Unless a theologian has the inner fortitude of a desert saint, he has only one effective remedy against the threat of cognitive collapse in the face of these pressures: he must huddle together with like-minded fellow deviants⁠—and huddle very closely indeed. Only in a countercommunity of considerable strength does cognitive deviance have a chance to maintain itself. The countercommunity provides continuing therapy against the creeping doubt as to whether, after all, one may not be wrong and the majority right. To fulfill its functions of providing social support for the deviant body of "knowledge," the countercommunity must provide a strong sense of solidarity among its members (a "fellowship of the saints" in a world rampant with devils) and it must be quite closed vis-à-vis the outside ("Be not yoked together with unbelievers"); in sum, it must be a kind of ghetto.”
― Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural

“Theology must begin and end with the question of truth.”
― Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural

“Joy is play’s intention. When this intention is actually realized, in joyful play, the time structure of the playful universe takes on a very specific quality—namely, it becomes eternity. This is probably true of all experiences of intense joy, even when they are not enveloped in the separate reality of play. This is the final insight of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in the midnight song: “All joy wills eternity—wills deep, deep eternity!”33”
― Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural

“A world without windows.”
― Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural

“Both in practice and in theoretical thought, human life gains the greatest part of its richness from the capacity for ecstasy, by which I do not mean the alleged experiences of the mystic, but any experience of stepping outside the taken-for-granted reality of everyday life, any openness to the mystery that surrounds us on all sides.”
― Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural

“To those who do not repudiate the religious insight of the race, the human spirit is uneasy in this world because it is at home elsewhere, and escape from the prison house is possible not only in fancy but in fact. The theist believes in possible beatitude, because he disbelieves in the dignified isolation of humanity. To him, therefore, romantic comedy is serious literature because it is a foretaste of the truth: the Fool is wiser than the Humanist; and clownage is less frivolous than the deification of humanity”
― Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural

“Man’s propensity for order is grounded in a faith or trust that, ultimately, reality is “in order,” “all right,” “as it should be.” Needless to say, there is no empirical method by which this faith can be tested. To assert it is itself an act of faith. But it is possible to proceed from the faith that is rooted in experience to the act of faith that transcends the empirical sphere, a procedure that could be called the argument from ordering. In this fundamental sense, every ordering gesture is a signal of transcendence.”
― Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural

“I am not concerned for the moment with either the viability of the translation process or the empirical validity of the premise about modern man, but rather with a hidden double standard, which can be put quite simply: The past, out of which the tradition comes, is relativized in terms of this or that socio-historical analysis. The present, however, remains strangely immune from relativization. In other words, the New Testament writers are seen as afflicted with a false consciousness rooted in their time, but the contemporary analyst takes the consciousness of his time as an unmixed intellectual blessing.”
― Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural

“sociology is the dismal science par excellence of our time, an intrinsically debunking discipline that should be most congenial to nihilists, cynics, and other fit subjects for police surveillance.”
― Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural