Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, by Jessica Stern. HarperCollins, August 2003. $27.95

The American people came face-to-face with the realities of worldwide terrorism following September 11. Although the United States only a few years before had been shocked by our own homegrown terrorists who perpetrated the Oklahoma City bombing, we never realized the extent to which religious militancy has come to replace Communism as the primary threat to our security. Jessica Stern, a lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and one of the world's foremost experts on terrorism, has written an indispensable book which attempts to explain the phenomenon of terrorism and the causes that help explain its attraction not only in the non-Western world but also in the United States. For four years Stern traveled extensively around the world to interview Christians, Jews, and Muslim extremists who were willing to enact horrendous terrorist acts in the name of God. Her conclusions, unsurprisingly, found that religious extremists, ranging from the Islamic jihadi in Pakistan to suicide bombers in Gaza and the West Bank, have much in common with our own Christian militants, who have committed murder against physicians who performed abortions, and followers of Christian Identity, the church of the white supremacist Aryan Nation, which spawned Timothy McVeigh.