Will Herberg

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Will Herberg (1901-1977) was an American Jewish writer, intellectual and scholar. He was known as a social philosopher and sociologist of religion, as well as a Jewish theologian.

He was brought up in a secular Jewish family in Manhattan, and became a communist, a follower of Jay Lovestone in the American Communist Party. He later turned away from Marxism and became a religious conservative, founding the quarterly Judaism with Robert Gordis and Milton Konvitz. During the 1960s he was Religion Editor of National Review, and taught at Drew University.

His essay, Protestant, Catholic, Jew, created a sociological framework for the study of religion in the United States. Herberg demonstrated how immigration and American ethnic culture were reflected in religious movements and institutions. ^[1] During the 1950s, this book, as well as the essay Judaism and Modern Man, set out influential positions, on Judaism and on the American religious tradition in general.

Herberg is also credited with coining the use of the phrase "cut flower culture" to describe modern European and American societies. This use of the epithet is typically taken to imply that these societies cannot long survive without being regrafted onto their Judeo-Christian roots, as interpreted by conservative American writers and enthusiasts of reading programs in the "great books" of western civilization.

[edit] Works

The Heritage of the Civil War (1932)
The Principles of Unionism (1936)
The CIO, Labor's New Challenge (1937)
Judaism and Modern Man: An Interpretation of Jewish Religion (1951)
Protestant, Catholic, Jew. An essay in American religious sociology (1955)
The Writings Of Martin Buber (1956) editor
Four Existentialist Theologians, a Reader from the Works of Jacques Maritain, Nicholas Berdyaev, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich (1958)
Faith Enacted As History: Essays in Biblical Theology (1976)
From Marxism to Judaism : The Collected Essays of Will Herberg (1992) edited by David Dalin