Peter L. Berger on Religion: The Social Reality of Religion, by TITUS HJELM
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hjelm describes his first encounter with the late Peter L. Berger’s thought as “simultaneously liberating and frustrating” (xiii). Admittedly, this captures something of my own experience reading Hjelm—except I would instead say something like “edifying and frustrating” (liberation, it seems to me, is too much to expect of a work of scholarship). On one hand, this is the best primer on Berger’s distinctive sociology of religion I’ve read. It’s punchy, impressively learned, and in classic Bergerian fashion, masterfully condenses a difficult and complex theoretical oeuvre into strikingly accessible prose. On the other hand, for reasons that I think have less to do with logical deficiencies in Hjelm’s argument, and much more to do with underlying differences between his and my theoretical inclinations, I found myself, especially while reading the final chapter of the book, profoundly dissatisfied with the direction Hjelm believes a Berger-inspired sociology of religion ought to go. Given this, let me get the much-warranted praise out of the way so that no reader of this review leaves with the impression that I do not think highly of this work or its author.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".