Mark Juergensmeyer > Quotes

“So my students sometimes say: “Everything you teach about religion you seem to like. You always say such positive things about Islam and such positive things about Judaism and Hinduism, which one do you believe?” And I say: “Which one do you think God believes?” [laughter] What the students say is true. I like all religions and I think religion is a natural expression of the higher aspirations of humanity just as it all too often is also an expression of the despotic and most base aspects of humanity.”
― Mark Juergensmeyer

“The most intense skeptics and the most intense believers of our age share a common conviction: that beneath all superficial appearances lies a deeper truth.”
― Mark Juergensmeyer

“But there was one occasion when we went down to a village to set up our feeding kitchens and I noticed there was another relief operation there that had the same American supplies that we had who were doing something quite different. They were organizing food-for-work programs so that the people in the village would actually work and be paid in food. And the work they were doing were things that would help the whole village…..building a road or a school…..building a dam to catch the water when the rains came again…..building tube wells to tap deep into the aquifer. So the villagers were given the dignity of work at the same time they were providing something for the infrastructure of the village.

I said: “That’s really smart. Who are these people?” Gandhians. They were members of the Sarvodaya Movement….the Gandhian Movement. And I said: “That’s what I want to do.

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― Mark Juergensmeyer

“When I came back I joined a black church in Oakland and that made me feel more at home, a bit like being connected to India. It felt funny to be around so many white people when I came back to the United States. It still bothers me. One of the things I liked living in Hawaii years later was the racial complexity of it. I remember that at the time when Sucheng and I got married--we met as graduate students at Berkeley and have been married almost forty years--one of the first houses we bought was in a Black neighborhood in west Berkeley and we didn’t quite notice how uniformly Black it was until some weeks later. I said to Sucheng, “You know, we’re the only white people in this neighborhood.” And she looked at me and said: “Speak for yourself, honkie!”
― Mark Juergensmeyer