ABSTRACT
The first half of this chapter tells how I was able to gain access and talk to a variety of religious activists involved in violence around the world, from the Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin to the Lutheran anti-abortion activist Michael Bray and the Burmese monk, Ashin Wirathu. The second half focuses on my approach to these interviews – how to enter religious minds through epistemic worldview analysis. It describes how one should bracket one’s own biases and assumptions as much as possible and conduct interviews as open-ended informative conversations. It advocates relational reasoning – formulating ideas about the worldview of the subject not through deductive or inductive reasoning, but the kind of reasoning that adapts to the responses of the subject and emerges from the relationship of scholar-subject in informative conversations. An important aspect of this kind of worldview analysis is an understanding of the socio-political setting of the worldview, to understand it not just as a nexus of ideas but a perspective that responds to and shapes the social and political context.
