Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion After September 11

It is tempting to view the perpetrators of the September 11 terrorist attacks as evil incarnate. But their motives, as Bruce Lincoln reveals in this insightful offering, were profoundly and intensely religious. What we need now, he argues, is greater clarity about what we take religion to be. With great rigor and incisiveness, Holy Terrors sorts through the details and the religious rhetoric of September 11—in the highjackers' instructions, George W. Bush's national address, Osama bin Laden's videotaped reply, and Pat Robertson's notorious interview with Jerry Falwell-and examines their implications for our understanding of religion and its interrelationships with politics and culture.

Bruce Lincoln is the Caroline E. Haskell Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, where he is an associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He is the author of eight books, including Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, which received an award in 2000 from the American Academy of Religion for Excellence in the Study of Religion.