R. Scott Appleby (USA)

is Professor of History and Director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, IL. He examines the roots of religious violence and the potential of religious peacebuilding and stresses the “Ambivalence of the Sacred”. He finished his Ph.D at the University of Chicago 1985 with distinction and was awarded with the Sophia Award for Theological Excellence in Washington. He has received three honorary doctorates. From 1988 to 1993 Appleby was co-director of the Fundamentalism Project, an international public policy study conducted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since 2001 he is a Fellow at the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences and since 2006 part of the Working Group on Religion, Secularism, and International Affairs of the Social Science Research Council in New York. Scott Appleby is the author of The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation (Lanham 2000); and co-author of Strong Religion: The Rise of Fundamentalisms around the World (Chicago 2003). With Martin E. Marty, he co-edited the five-volume Fundamentalism Project with titles like Fundamentalisms and the State: remaking Polities, Economies, and Militance (Chicago 1993). He wrote several articles, including The Study, Practice and Construction of Religion: The Case for Religious Peacebuilding (2004); Disciples of the Prince of Peace? Christian Resources for Nonviolent Peacebuilding (2005); A Moment of Opportunity? The Promise of Religious Peacebuilding in an Era of Religious and Ethnic Conflict (2004).