This collection of essays on the life and work of Peter Ludwig Berger (March 17, 1929–June 27, 2017) offers a broad perspective on his many contributions to sociology and social theory. But his contributions also go well beyond these fields. His uses of both empirical observation and theoretical insight made Peter the most effective kind of activist, always committed to arguing about how to help people in various nations help themselves. His meditations on religion, secularism, capitalism, mediating structures, and pluralism are living proof that he saw in quite familiar commitments to family, community, and nation, those ingredients that contribute to what has lately been called “flourishing.” He could not be easily pigeonholed to one political side or the other. Faith and reason were for him incompatible with ideology.

I first met Peter L. Berger in the mid-1970s when he was president of the Eastern Sociological Society. We met again in 1981 when his wife Brigitte hired me at Wellesley College, where I have remained for the past 40 years. Both Peter and Brigitte were everything I wanted to be as a sociologist with their ever broadening and deepening erudition that was always directed to matters of public interest and importance. With my appointment in 1998 as an Editor-in-Chief of Society, I began a fruitful collaboration with Peter and what was then the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture and what later became the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs. We worked together on many conferences that were eventually published in the journal as well as in books. This was what Peter sometimes referred to as “the business side” of our relationship.

I was fortunate to know Peter over these same years in special ways that others close to him knew him. I have never been very good at remembering jokes. Peter offered a constant supply of them every time we met to discuss our work together. One sociologist who reviewed Peter’s book on humor wrote, “Consider it a benevolent and profound sermon about the possibilities of benign humor for lifting the human spirit.”