Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State
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On Saturday, we will be airing a special one-hour program on the global rise in religious fundamentalism and in particular the political revolution and/or rebellion of groups who seemed defined by their religion against the industrial nations whether capitalistic or s0-called communistic. What are the motives of these groups? Why have they become so numerous over the last 4o years? Does religion act as the catalyst, cause, or as a tool for these uprisings? And, how do those nations best deal with the violence these groups target them with, while finding new ways to prevent these uprisings in the first place?
To speak to these questions and more, we will have on the line sociologist Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to Al Queda. Juergensmeyer is an American scholar and writer best known for his studies of religious violence and global religion. He also has written on conflict resolution and on South Asian religion and society, and has been a pioneer in the field of global studies.
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; at the University of Hawaii he was founding dean of the School of Hawaiian, Asian, and Pacific Studies; and later he taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he was founding director of the global and international studies program and the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies.