Early Intellectual Development
A product of a German immigrant community in Missouri and Illinois, Juergensmeyer early aspired to be a Methodist minister. He received a B.A. in philosophy at the University of Illinois (1958–62), and attended Union Theological Seminary in New York City (1963–65). He was one of the last students of the Protestant theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, who combined religious reflection with political insights and a passion for social justice. Juergensmeyer also studied at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. He was deeply affected by the Civil Rights movement as an activist working for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and as a co-founder of Seminarians for Civil Rights. He also became involved in protests against the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, and briefly served as a freelance radio correspondent in Vietnam in 1965. He lived in India from 1966 to 1967 where he taught political science at Panjab University in Chandigarh and worked in famine relief in the Indian state of Bihar. He joined the Gandhian Sarvodaya Movement, working directly with its leader, Jayaprakash Narayan.
Juergensmeyer returned to graduate school in political science at the University of California, Berkeley (1967–1974), where he received his PhD. In 1969 he married a fellow graduate student, Sucheng Chan, who later became a professor at the University of California-Berkeley, provost of Oakes College at the University of California-Santa Cruz, and founding chair of the Asian-American Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In Berkeley Juergensmeyer began to focus on the relation of religion and politics, and more generally, on the role of social values in public life. These topics remained central to his concerns throughout his academic career.
Read more about this topic: Mark Juergensmeyer
Famous quotes containing the words early, intellectual and/or development:
“The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Romenot by favor of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (182595)
“Unfortunately, moral beauty in artlike physical beauty in a personis extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The highest form of development is to govern ones self.”
—Zerelda G. Wallace (18171901)