Why has the turn of the twenty-first century been rocked by a new religious rebellion? From al Qaeda to Christian militias to insurgents in Iraq, a strident new religious activism has seized the imaginations of political rebels around the world. Building on his groundbreaking book, The New Cold War?: Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State, Mark Juergensmeyer here provides an up-to-date road map through this complex new religious terrain. Basing his discussion on interviews with militant activists and case studies of rebellious movements, Juergensmeyer puts a human face on conflicts that have become increasingly abstract. He revises our notions of religious revolution and offers positive proposals for responding to religious activism in ways that will diminish the violence and lead to an accommodation between radical religion and the secular world.
MARK JUERGENSMEYER is director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, professor of sociology, and affiliate professor of 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 twenty books. His latest book, Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State (University of California Press, 2008) covers the rise of religious activism from al Qaeda to the Christian militia, and explores its confrontation with secular modernity. It is based on his earlier book, The New Cold War? named by the New York Times as one of the notable books of the year. 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 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. His book on Gandhian conflict resolution has 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. He has edited The Oxford Handbook of Global Religions (Oxford University Press 2006) and Religion in Global Civil Society (Oxford University Press 2005). He is co-editing two encyclopedias--one in global religion and the other in global studies--and is co-editing the Princeton Reader in Religion and Violence. His 2006 Stafford Little Lectures at Princeton University, God and War, will also be published by Princeton University Press.
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 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 Honorary Doctorates from Lehigh University in 2004 and Roskilde University in Denmark in 2009. He has also received a Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2006, and the Unitas Distinguished Alumnus Award from Union Theological Seminary, New York City, in 2007. He was elected president of the American Academy of Religion, and chairs the working group on Religion and International Affairs for the national Social Science Research Council. Since the events of September 11 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.
