Mark Juergensmeyer - Early Intellectual Development

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.