Аннотация:I read Peter Berger’s The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion in the winter of 1996 while studying abroad at the Divinity School at Edinburgh University. I vividly remember several dark afternoons and evenings in a student dormitory frantically underlining almost the whole book while regularly pushing the button on my space heater to stay warm. The first half of the book captivated me. The second half about secularization puzzled me and made me angry—I thought Berger was wrong, while the instructor who taught the course for which I was reading the book thought he was right. This volume, and the passionately argued paper I wrote that semester about how the secularization thesis could not be simplistically applied to the American case, drew me to the sociology of religion—a field and discipline I had never heard of when I started college. Many of the authors in this symposium have their own versions of my story—of being captivated by The Sacred Canopy, inspired by it, and watching how it shaped their work and that of their colleagues. While the arguments about secularization in the volume have been well-debated, we mark its fiftieth anniversary in this symposium by asking what influence it has had—as a whole—on studies of sociology and religion around the world.
