ABSTRACT

Under the auspices of Culture, Religion and World Affairs (CURA) and its predecessors, and within the framework of the institute's neo-Weberian agenda, Peter L. Berger and his many collaborators have tilled a number of hitherto largely fallow fields. The institute's studies on Pentecostalism can certainly be described as pioneering. Berger recognized earlier than most the "veritable tsunami of Pentecostal Christianity sweeping across Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Asia, and other unlikely places". However, the range of research topics covered by the institute is by no means limited to themes such as Pentecostalism, Eastern Christian Orthodoxy's relation to democracy in Russia, or the quantitative increase in the well-educated Evangelical middle class in America. The strongly empirically oriented research program of CURA and its predecessors, which has been outlined only roughly here, has not yet yielded a differentiated theory of the relationship between culture and socioeconomic change.