Newswise — This fall, 1,400 honors students will read and discuss the book "Terror in the Name of God" in their Dean's Book Course, a small-group seminar series required of all Commonwealth College students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The honors college will also be sponsoring a symposium on the subject and hosting a talk by the book's author, Jessica Stern. Stern is a Lecturer in public policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a former member of President Bill Clinton's National Security Council staff.
This past year, 14 senior honors students selected the book from over 40 books they were considering as part of their capstone seminar known as the Dean's Readers. Students made the choice because Stern's combination of extensive scholarly research and first-hand interviews with members of both domestic and foreign religious extremist groups—Christians, Jews and Muslims—promises to create a unique platform from which next year's students and faculty will examine many of today's most pressing issues. Those concerns include 9/11, the recently uncovered terror plot at JFK airport, revelations about prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and current tensions with Iran.
Among themselves, the Dean's Readers found that "Terror in the Name of God" inspired discussions focused less on specific acts of terrorism than on the ways Stern's narrative forced them to re-evaluate their own personal ideologies and beliefs about terrorism's roots.
This past spring, through the Dean's Book Course, Commonwealth College students read Marjane Satrapi's two-part graphic memoir of coming of age in Iran during and after the Islamic Revolution, "Persepolis" and "Persepolis 2." Smith College recently chose "Persepolis" as summer reading for its incoming students.
Commonwealth College is the honors college at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. For more information about the author's visit or Commonwealth College's Dean's Book Course, please visit http://www.comcol.umass.edu/dbc.
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