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Commentary

December 2002

About the Respondents

Mark Juergensmeyer

Mark Juergensmeyer is Director of Global and International Studies and Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is author or editor of fourteen books on global religion and politics including Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California Press 2000), The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (University of California Press 1993), Gandhi's Way: A Handbook of Conflict Resolution (University of California Press 2002), and the forthcoming Global Religions: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press 2003).

Bruce B. Lawrence

Bruce B. Lawrence is the Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus Humanities Professor of Religion and also Chair of the Department of Religion at Duke University, where he has served on the faculty since 1971. A graduate of Princeton University, with a Master of Divinity from Episcopal Divinity School (Cambridge), he earned his doctorate at Yale University in History of Religions. There he was trained to engage the large swath of Asia known as West and South Asia, with particular reference to the cultures and languages, the history and religious practices marked as Muslim. But he also concerns himself with the non-Muslim religious traditions of Asia, especially Hinduism and Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism, at the same time that he pursues the turbulent reconnections of Europe to Asia that were forged in colonial, then post-colonial encounters. His early books explored the intellectual and social history of Asian Muslims. Shahrastani on the Indian Religions (1976) was followed by Notes from a Distant Flute (1978), The Rose and the Rock (1979) and Ibn Khaldun and Islamic Ideology (1984). Since the mid-80s, he has been especially concerned with the interplay between religion and ideology. The test case of fundamentalism became the topic of his award-winning monograph, Defenders of God: The Fundamentalist Revolt Against the Modern Age (1989/1995). A parallel but narrower enquiry informed his latest monograph, Shattering the Myth: Islam beyond Violence (1998/2000), while his next two monographs will once again tackle broader theoretical issues. Go, God, Go: Resilient Religion in the Global Century, (forthcoming in Fall 2001 from W.W. Norton) looks at the complex interaction of ideology, theology and spiritual practices in multiple contexts throughout the 20th century. Its audience will be general, as was the audience of his trade book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Religions Online (Macmillan, 2000). However, academic inquiry into religious pluralism and diasporic communities will guide his second monograph in progress on Asian religions in America. Titled New Faiths/Old Fears, it concerns Asian religions in America, especially since 1965, and will be based on lectures that he gave on recent immigrants and the challenge of their spiritual practices to North American norms and values. It is scheduled to be published by Columbia University Press in Spring 2002. In the meantime two more collaborative works, books that he has written with colleagues from the Triangle area, will appear. The first, Beyond Turk and Hindu: Contesting Islamicate India, was edited with Professor David Gilmartin of North Carolina State University, and it is due out from University Press of Florida in December 2000, while the other, co-written with Professor Carl Ernst of UNC-Chapel Hill, is a monograph titled Burnt Hearts: The Chishti Brotherhood in South Asia and Beyond. It will be published from Curzon Press in Summer 2001.

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