Mark Juergensmeyer: Terror in the Mind of God

Recorded Live: Sunday, Jan. 13, 2008, 9:30 am PST

G U E S T :

• Mark Juergensmeyer
  Director, Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, and Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

Moderated by : The Very Rev. Alan Jones,
Dean of Grace Cathedral

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About the Program:

Mark Juergensmeyer is Director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies and Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is an expert on religious violence, conflict resolution and South Asian religion and politics, and has published more than two hundred articles and a dozen books.

His widely-read Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California Press, revised edition 2003), is based on interviews with violent religious activists around the world--including individuals convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, leaders of Hamas, and abortion clinic bombers in the United States--and was listed by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times as one of the best nonfiction books of the year. A previous book, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (University of California Press, 1993) covers the rise of religious activism and its confrontation with secular modernity. It was named by the New York Times as one of the notable books of the year. His book on Gandhian conflict resolution has recently been reprinted as Gandhi's Way (University of California Press, Updated Edition, 2005), and was selected as Community Book of the Year at the University of California, Davis.

His most recent work is an edited volume, Global Religions (Oxford University Press 2003), and he is working on a book on religion and war, and an edited volume on religion in global civil society.

Juergensmeyer has received research fellowships from the Wilson Center in Washington D.C., the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is the 2003 recipient of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for contributions to the study of religion, and is the 2004 recipient of the Silver Award of the Queen Sofia Center for the Study of Violence in Spain. He received an Honorary Doctorate from Lehigh University in 2004. Since the events of September 11, 2001, he has been a frequent commentator in the news media, including CNN, NBC, CBS, BBC, NPR, Fox News, ABC's Politically Incorrect, and CNBC's Dennis Miller Show.