Peter L. Berger

The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.

I'm sure Putnam is right that there's been a decline in certain kinds of organizations like bowling leagues. But people participate in communities in other ways.

One can't understand the Christian Right and similar movements unless one sees them as reactive - they're reacting to what they call secular humanism.

Let me say again that the relationship is asymmetrical: there's no democracy without a market economy, but you can have a market economy without democracy.

So I think one can say on empirical grounds - not because of some philosophical principle - that you can't have democracy unless you have a market economy.

If you say simply that pressures toward democracy are created by the market, I would say yes.

Even in a society as tightly controlled as Singapore's, the market creates certain forces which perhaps in the long run may lead to democracy.

The basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude.

There is a continuum of values between the churches and the general community. What distinguishes the handling of these values in the churches is mainly the heavier dosage of religious vocabulary involved.

We also have a cultural phenomenon: the emergence of a global culture, or of cultural globalization.

It has been true in Western societies and it seems to be true elsewhere that you do not find democratic systems apart from capitalism, or apart from a market economy, if you prefer that term.

The problem with liberal Protestantism in America is not that it has not been orthodox enough, but that it has lost a lot of religious substance.