R. Scott Appleby is the John M. Regan Jr. Director of the Kroc Institute and Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. Appleby is the author of The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation (Rowman & Littlefield 2000) and editor of Spokesmen for the Despised: Fundamentalist Leaders of the Middle East (University of Chicago 1997). With Martin E. Marty, he co-edited the five-volume Fundamentalism Project (University of Chicago Press). He is a contributing author to Rethinking Secularism (a forthcoming SSRC volume), a previous co-chair of the SSRC's Advisory Committee on Religion and International Affairs, and the director of Contending Modernities.