Controversial New Religions

Controversial New Religions PDF Author: James R. Lewis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199315310
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 495

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Book Description
In terms of public opinion, new religious movements are considered controversial for a variety of reasons. Their social organization often runs counter to popular expectations by experimenting with communal living, alternative leadership roles, unusual economic dispositions, and new political and ethical values. As a result the general public views new religions with a mixture of curiosity, amusement, and anxiety, sustained by lavish media emphasis on oddness and tragedy rather than familiarity and lived experience. This updated and revised second edition of Controversial New Religions offers a scholarly, dispassionate look at those groups that have generated the most attention, including some very well-known classical groups like The Family, Unification Church, Scientology, and Jim Jones's People's Temple; some relative newcomers such as the Kabbalah Centre, the Order of the Solar Temple, Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, and the Falun Gong; and some interesting cases like contemporary Satanism, the Raelians, Black nationalism, and various Pagan groups. Each essay combines an overview of the history and beliefs of each organization or movement with original and insightful analysis. By presenting decades of scholarly work on new religious movements written in an accessible form by established scholars as well as younger experts in the field, this book will be an invaluable resource for all those who seek a view of new religions that is deeper than what can be found in sensationalistic media stories.

Controversial New Religions

Controversial New Religions PDF Author: James R. Lewis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199315310
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 495

Get Book

Book Description
In terms of public opinion, new religious movements are considered controversial for a variety of reasons. Their social organization often runs counter to popular expectations by experimenting with communal living, alternative leadership roles, unusual economic dispositions, and new political and ethical values. As a result the general public views new religions with a mixture of curiosity, amusement, and anxiety, sustained by lavish media emphasis on oddness and tragedy rather than familiarity and lived experience. This updated and revised second edition of Controversial New Religions offers a scholarly, dispassionate look at those groups that have generated the most attention, including some very well-known classical groups like The Family, Unification Church, Scientology, and Jim Jones's People's Temple; some relative newcomers such as the Kabbalah Centre, the Order of the Solar Temple, Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, and the Falun Gong; and some interesting cases like contemporary Satanism, the Raelians, Black nationalism, and various Pagan groups. Each essay combines an overview of the history and beliefs of each organization or movement with original and insightful analysis. By presenting decades of scholarly work on new religious movements written in an accessible form by established scholars as well as younger experts in the field, this book will be an invaluable resource for all those who seek a view of new religions that is deeper than what can be found in sensationalistic media stories.

Controversial New Religions

Controversial New Religions PDF Author: James R. Lewis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199394369
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
In terms of public opinion, new religious movements are considered controversial for a variety of reasons. Their social organization often runs counter to popular expectations by experimenting with communal living, alternative leadership roles, unusual economic dispositions, and new political and ethical values. As a result the general public views new religions with a mixture of curiosity, amusement, and anxiety, sustained by lavish media emphasis on oddness and tragedy rather than familiarity and lived experience. This updated and revised second edition of Controversial New Religions offers a scholarly, dispassionate look at those groups that have generated the most attention, including some very well-known classical groups like The Family, Unification Church, Scientology, and Jim Jones's People's Temple; some relative newcomers such as the Kabbalah Centre, the Order of the Solar Temple, Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate, and the Falun Gong; and some interesting cases like contemporary Satanism, the Raelians, Black nationalism, and various Pagan groups. Each essay combines an overview of the history and beliefs of each organization or movement with original and insightful analysis. By presenting decades of scholarly work on new religious movements written in an accessible form by established scholars as well as younger experts in the field, this book will be an invaluable resource for all those who seek a view of new religions that is deeper than what can be found in sensationalistic media stories.

Controversial New Religions

Controversial New Religions PDF Author: James R. Lewis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195156836
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
Featuring the new religious movements (NRMs) that have attracted the most scholarly attention over the past few years, this text includes groups such as the Branch Davidians, Heaven's Gate and Falun Gong, explaining their ethos and beliefs, as well as examining more controversial accusations.

Mystics and Messiahs

Mystics and Messiahs PDF Author: Philip Jenkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195127447
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
In this full-length account of cults and anti-cult scares in American history, Jenkins gives accurate historical perspective and shows how many of today's mainstream religions were originally regarded as cults.

Legitimating New Religions

Legitimating New Religions PDF Author: James R. Lewis
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813533247
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
This work deals explicitly with the issue of how emerging religions legitimate themselves. It contends that a new religion has at least four different, though overlapping, areas where legitimacy is a concern: making converts, maintaining followers, shaping public opinion and appeasing government authorities. The legitimacy that new religions seek in the public realm is primarily that of social acceptance. recognizing its status as a genuine religion and thus recognizing its right to exist. Through a series of wide-ranging case studies James Lewis explores the diversification of legitimation strategies of new religions as well as the tactics that their critics use to de-legitimate such groups. Cases include the Movement for Spiritual Inner Awareness, Native American prophet religions, spiritualism, the Church of Christ-Scientist, Scientology, Church of Satan, Heaven's Gate, Unitarianism, Hindu reform movements and Soka Gakkai, a new Buddhist sect. to the legitimation strategies deployed by established religions, the book sheds light on classic questions about the origin of all religions.

The Cambridge Companion to New Religious Movements

The Cambridge Companion to New Religious Movements PDF Author: Olav Hammer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521196507
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
This volume addresses the key features of new religions, such as Scientology, the Moonies and Jihadist movements, from a systematic, comparative perspective.

Encyclopedia of New Religions

Encyclopedia of New Religions PDF Author: Christopher Hugh Partridge
Publisher: Lion Books
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
A comprehensive and authoritative guide to over 200 new religions, sects and alternative spiritualities

New Religious Movements and Religious Liberty in America

New Religious Movements and Religious Liberty in America PDF Author: Derek Davis
Publisher: J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies Baylo Ity
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
It has been said that the measure of a healthy and civilized society is how well it treats its elderly and indigent. Perhaps it should be said also that the measure of the health of religious liberty in a society is the degree to which minority, nontraditional faiths are protected. This book is a collection of essays on the subject of religious liberty and new religious movements (NRMs). NRMs are often called "cults" by popular media commentators and the public at large, but scholars eschew that term because it is so pejorative that it skews the argument from the very beginning. By contrast, the term "new religious movements" attempts to place NRMs squarely in the mix with older, more traditional forms of religion. This is due in part to the fact that in America there should be no correlation between the level of social approval a group has achieved and the degree of religious liberty it enjoys. As the Supreme Court itself averred famously in the 1872 case Watson v. Jones, "The Law knows no heresy and is committed to the support of no dogma, the establishment of no sect." Each author represented in this volume believes that NRMs should enjoy the same liberties as more mainstream religions. If the book has a bias, it is a bias in favor of religious liberty. The authors believe that if the First Amendment is applied to protect the newest, nontraditional, seemingly unusual religions (by the standards of the majority of the population), then nearly everyone is safe as far as religious liberty is concerned. -- "The Cult Awareness Network and the Anticult Movement: Implications for NRMs in America" by Anson Shupe, Susan E. Darnell, and Kendrick Moxon -- "Scientology: Separating Truthfrom Fiction" by Heber C. Jentzsch -- "Witchcraft and Satanism" by Stuart A. Wright -- "Women in Controversial New Religions: Slaves, Priestesses, or Pioneers" by Susan Palmer -- "New Religious Movements and Conflicts with Law Enforcement Agencies" by Catherine Wessinger

The Church of Scientology

The Church of Scientology PDF Author: Hugh B. Urban
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691158053
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Scientology's long and complex journey to recognition as a religion Scientology is one of the wealthiest and most powerful new religions to emerge in the past century. To its detractors, L. Ron Hubbard's space-age mysticism is a moneymaking scam and sinister brainwashing cult. But to its adherents, it is humanity's brightest hope. Few religious movements have been subject to public scrutiny like Scientology, yet much of what is written about the church is sensationalist and inaccurate. Here for the first time is the story of Scientology's protracted and turbulent journey to recognition as a religion in the postwar American landscape. Hugh Urban tells the real story of Scientology from its cold war-era beginnings in the 1950s to its prominence today as the religion of Hollywood's celebrity elite. Urban paints a vivid portrait of Hubbard, the enigmatic founder who once commanded his own private fleet and an intelligence apparatus rivaling that of the U.S. government. One FBI agent described him as "a mental case," but to his followers he is the man who "solved the riddle of the human mind." Urban details Scientology's decades-long war with the IRS, which ended with the church winning tax-exempt status as a religion; the rancorous cult wars of the 1970s and 1980s; as well as the latest challenges confronting Scientology, from attacks by the Internet group Anonymous to the church's efforts to suppress the online dissemination of its esoteric teachings. The Church of Scientology demonstrates how Scientology has reflected the broader anxieties and obsessions of postwar America, and raises profound questions about how religion is defined and who gets to define it.

Controversial New Religions

Controversial New Religions PDF Author: James R. Lewis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780190258245
Category : Cults
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
In terms of public opinion, new religious movements are considered controversial for a variety of reasons. Their social organisation often runs counter to popular expectations by experimenting with communal living, alternative leadership roles, unusual economic dispositions, and new political and ethical values. As a result the general public views new religions with a mixture of curiosity, amusement, and anxiety, sustained by lavish media emphasis on oddness and tragedy rather than familiarity and lived experience. This book looks at those groups that have generated the most attention.