Mark Juergensmeyer

Mark Juergensmeyer (born 1940 in Carlinville, Illinois) is an American scholar in religious studies and sociology and a writer best known for his studies of religious violence and global religion. He also writes on conflict resolution and on South Asian religion and society, and is a pioneer in the field of global studies. He is a commentator on national radio and television, and has written or edited over twenty books, including Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State (2008), and Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (2003). Both are 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.

Juergensmeyer taught at University of California, Berkeley for fifteen years in a joint position as coordinator of religious studies for UC Berkeley and director of the Office of Programs in Comparative Religion at the Graduate Theological Union (1974–89); at the University of Hawaii he was founding dean of the School of Hawaiian, Asian, and Pacific Studies (1989–93); and later he taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1993–present), where he was founding director of the global and international studies program and the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies. Juergensmeyer is the 2003 recipient of the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for contributions to the study of religion, the 2004 recipient of the Silver Award of the Queen Sofia Center for the Study of Violence in Spain, and was elected president of the American Academy of Religion for 2008-09.

A product of a German immigrant community in Missouri and Illinois, Juergensmeyer initially aspired to be a Methodist minister. He received a B.A. in philosophy at the University of Illinois (1958–62), and attended Union Theological Seminary in New York City (1963–65). He was one of the last students of the Protestant theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, who combined religious reflection with political insights and a passion for social justice. Juergensmeyer also studied at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He was deeply affected by the Civil Rights Movement as an activist working for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and as a co-founder of Seminarians for Civil Rights. He also became involved in protests against the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and briefly served as a freelance radio correspondent in Vietnam in 1965. He lived in India from 1966 to 1967 where he taught political science at Panjab University in Chandigarh and worked in famine relief in the Indian state of Bihar. He joined the Gandhian Sarvodaya Movement, working directly with its leader, Jayaprakash Narayan.

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