Social Science Research Council
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. His books include the forthcoming Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State (University of California Press 2008) and the widely-read Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California Press, revised edition 2003). He has edited the Oxford Handbook of Global Religion (Oxford University Press 2006) and is co-editing The Encyclopedia of Global Religions (Sage Publications 2008). He is the chair of the SSRC working group on religion, secularism, and international affairs.
Last September, I sat down at UC-Berkeley with the eminent sociologist of religion, Robert Bellah, for a discussion about religious evolution, the ideas of religion and secularism, the rise of extreme positions associated with both of those terms, and the future of universalistic faiths in an emerging global civil society. The following is an excerpt from our discussion, a full transcript of which is available here (PDF).
Abdullahi An-Na’im is a man with a mission. As the expatriate Sudanese law professor told The New Yorker writer George Packer in a recent article, his new book on Islam and the Secular State was written as “a work of advocacy more than of scholarship.” But as an advocate to whom? [...]
The first time I met Benazir’s father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, many years ago, I bought a new suit for the occasion. He was Prime Minister of Pakistan at the time and I was representing Berkeley in an attempt to launch a new Urdu language program for American students to be based in Lahore. We needed the government’s approval, and that meant a nod from Bhutto. Being a young Californian, I was not used to wearing suits, but Bhutto was Bhutto, the very model of urbane sophistication, and I wanted to impress him. [...]
Read the rest of The death of secular democracy in Pakistan?.
Subscribe to the RSS feed for