Mark Juergensmeyer

A book based on a five- year Luce Foundation-funded project surveying the changing role of religion in global society was published as God in the Tumult of the Global Square (co-authored with Dinah Griego and John Soboslai). In 2019 Oxford University Press published a book based on lectures given by Juergensmeyer at Princeton and Muenster, God at War: The Alternative Realities of Religion and War. A five-year project funded by Uppsala University, Sweden, resulted in a publication on how jihadi terrorist movements terminate, When God Stops Fighting: How Religious Violence Ends (2022).

Juergensmeyer is the 2003 recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for contributions to the study of religion, and was elected president of the American Academy of Religion for 2008-09. He was a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC in 1988-89 and has been the recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the American Institute for Indian Studies. Juergensmeyer has received honorary doctorate degrees from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, Dayalbagh Educational Institute in India, and Roskilde University in Denmark, and the Silver Medal from Spain’s Queen Sofia Center for the Study of Violence. In 2019 he was named the year’s Distinguished Scholar by the Religion and International Affairs section of the International Studies Association.

In 2001 he published Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, a comparative study of religious terrorism. It was named as a notable book of the year by The Washington Post. The revised fourth edition was published in 2017. This book introduced the concepts of “cosmic war” and “performance violence” as central to religious-related terrorism.

In the 1990s he turned toward the issue of religion and violence around the world. The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State was cited by The New York Times as a notable book of the year in 1995. It has been revised and republished as Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State.

Juergensmeyer taught at the 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 Hawaiʻi 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 (1993–2021), where he was founding director of the global and international studies program and the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies. After retirement he accepted a temporary position at Claremont McKenna College.

Juergensmeyer received a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Illinois in 1962, a M.Div. from the Union Theological Seminary, New York in 1965, and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974. He has also done graduate work in international relations at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University. He is married to the University of California, Santa Barbara emerita professor Sucheng Chan.

Mark Juergensmeyer (born 1940 in Carlinville, Illinois) is an American sociologist and scholar specialized in global studies and religious studies, and a writer best known for his studies on comparative religion, religious violence, and global religion. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow and Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College.