This volume marks the culmination of the Fundamentalism Project, the landmark series that brings together scholars from around the world to explore the nature and impact of fundamentalist movements in the twentieth century. The four previous volumes provide the most comprehensive information available on the social, political, cultural, and religious contexts of fundamentalism in the major religious traditions.

In this fifth volume, the distinguished contributors return to and test the project's beginning premise: that fundamentalisms in all faiths share certain "family resemblances." Several of the essays reconsider the project's original definition of fundamentalism as a reactive, absolutist, and comprehensive mode of anti-secular religious activism.

Some contributors challenge the idea that fundamentalism is a distinctively modern phenomenon, while others question whether the term "fundamentalist" can accurately be applied to movements outside Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Several of the essays also employ new approaches, drawn from literary criticism and from psychology, in their assessments of the problems of comparing fundamentalisms.