Peter van der Veer is Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity at Göttingen. Among his major publications are Gods on Earth (LSE Monographs, 1988), Religious Nationalism (University of California Press, 1994), and Imperial Encounters (Princeton University Press, 2001). He also contributed a chapter to the SSRC volume Rethinking Secularism (Oxford University Press, 2011). You can read the TIF discussion of his 2013 book The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India here.