Catherine L. Albanese

is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of the widely used textbook America: Religions and Religion, now in its third edition, and of numerous other articles and books, including Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age. Her most recent publications are American Spiritualities: A Reader, Reconsidering Nature Religion, and "American Religious History: A Bibliographical Essay," just published by the U.S. State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, and available on-line at http://exchanges.state.gov/education/amstudy/currents.htm. In April 2003, Albanese was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship to complete her next book, A Republic of Mystics and Metaphysicians: A Cultural History of U.S. Metaphysical Religion. Albanese is a former president of the American Academy of Religion.

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 an expert on religious violence, conflict resolution and South Asian religion and politics, and has published more than two hundred articles and a dozen books.

His widely-read Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California Press, revised edition 2003), is based on interviews with violent religious activists around the world--including individuals convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, leaders of Hamas, and abortion clinic bombers in the United States--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 (University of California Press 1993) 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 (University of California Press 2002), and his most recent book is an edited volume, Global Religions (Oxford University Press 2003).

He has received research fellowships from the Wilson Center in Washington D.C., the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the 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 he has been a frequent commentator in the news media, including CNN, NBC, CBS, BBC, NPR, Fox News and ABC's Politically Incorrect.

Phillip Hammond

retired in July, 2002, as the D. Mackenzie Brown Professor of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He was a university professor for 42 years, teaching at Yale, Wisconsin, Arizona, the final 24 tears at UCSB. He remains active, teaching an occasional course, and he is involved in two book projects. His last three books are With Liberty For All, Soka Gakkai In America, and The Dynamics of Religious Organizations.

Suzanne J. Crawford

received her B.A. in Religion and History from Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, before going on to receive her MA in History and Critical Theories of Religion from Vanderbilt University. She began the Ph.D. program at UCSB in 1997, and graduates in June of this year. Her dissertation, "Body as Battleground: Faith, Gender and Wellness Among Native Communities of Washington State," discusses the interaction of Religion and Healing among Native communities of Southwest Washington State. She has just accepted a tenure-track position in Religion and Culture at Pacific Lutheran University, in Tacoma, Washington.

Suzanne's publications include, "(Re)Constructing Bodies: Semiotic Sovereignty and the Debate Over Kennewick Man," in Devon Mihesuah's Repatriation Reader: Who Owns Native American Remains (University of Nebraska Press, 2000); she is co-editor of the three-volume American Indian Religious Traditions: An Encyclopedia (ABC-CLIO, 2003); and is currently writing a volume on Global Indigenous Religious Traditions for Prentice Hall's Religions of the World Series.

Paul Spickard

 

teaches history and Asian American studies at UC Santa Barbara. Educated at Harvard and Berkeley, he has taught at nine other institutions, including a community college, liberal arts colleges, and research universities. Among his books are: Racial Thinking in the United States (2004); Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America (2003); Pacific Diaspora: Island Peoples in the United States and Across the Pacific (2003); We Are a People: Narrative and Multiplicity in Constructing Ethnic Identity (2001); Japanese Americans (1996); and Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (1989). His current projects involve a comparative history of ethnic systems around the world and a book reframing American immigration history from the race and power perspective of ethnic studies.

Rhonda Parks Manville

 

Rhonda Parks Manville is an award-winning writer at the Santa Barbara News-Press, where she has covered the religion beat for the past six years. She earned a master's degree from UCSB's Department of Religious Studies in 2000, and she won American Academy of Religion's award for best in-depth reporting on religion in 2001.

Rhonda Parks Manville

 

J. Shawn Landres is an advanced doctoral candidate in Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Lecturer in the Department of Jewish Studies and Western Civilization at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, California. His dissertation compares "Generation X" religious and liturgical practices among evangelical Protestants and Jews. He is a co-chair of the American Academy of Religion's Religion in Central and Eastern Europe consultation and a founding member of the steering committee of the AAR's consultation on the Anthropology of Religion. Shawn is a Capps Junior Fellow at UCSB's Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Religion and Public Life and previously was a Keith Murray Senior Scholar in Lincoln College, Oxford. He is the co-editor of and a contributor to Personal Knowledge and Beyond: Reshaping the Ethnography of Religion (New York University Press, 2002), and has published numerous articles and book chapters on such varied topics as Asian-American murals, social anthropology education in the United Kingdom, Jewish identity in the Slovak Republic, and the relationship between ritual & civil society. His current book projects include Recovering Memory: Exposing Religion, Violence, and the Remembrance of Place (co-edited with Oren B. Stier) and Generation X Judaism.

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