Biographical note

Mark Juergensmeyer (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1974) 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 200 articles and a dozen books. His Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence is based on interviews with violent religious activists around the world 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 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 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, 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, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, U.S. Institute of Peace, and 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. Since the events of September 11, 2001, he has been a frequent commentator on televised news media. Wade Clark Roof holds a PhD in the sociology and psychology of religion from the University of North Carolina. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Religion at UCSB. His main areas of research interest are sociology of religion and American religious trends, and he has published widely in both fields, most recently serving as editor in chief for Macmillan Reference's Contemporary American Religion (2000). He also teaches a range of both undergraduate and graduate courses on religion and society.