1st Edition
Cults in Context Readings in the Study of New Religious Movements
By Lorne Dawson
Copyright 1998
482 Pages
by
Routledge
484 Pages
by
Routledge
480 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
In the face of the increasingly variegated ideological landscape of contemporary America, cults have become the focus of public controversy. The growth of new religions has been matched by the development of an organized and vocal opposition, the anti-cult movement. This in turn has prompted an extensive investigation of new religious movements (NRMs) by sociologists and psychologists of religion,... Read more
A: The Nature and Study of Cults; One: The Scientific Study of Religion? You Must Be Joking!; Two: Definitions of Cult: From Sociological-Technical to Popular-Negative; Three: Three Types of New Religious Movements; B: The Historical and Sociological Context of Cults; Four: A Time when Mountains were Moving; Five: The New Religions: Demodernization and the Protest Against Modernity; Six: Secularization, Revival, and Cult Formation; C: Who Joins New Religious Movements and Why?; Seven: The Role of Deprivation in the Origin and Evolution of Religious Groups; Eight: On Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective; Nine: The Joiners; D: The Coercive Conversion Controversy; Ten: The Seduction Syndrome; Eleven: A Critique of “Brainwashing” Claims About New Religious Movements; Twelve: Clinical and Personality Assessment of Participants in New Religions; E: The Satanism Scare; Thirteen: The Construction of Satanism as a Social Problem in Canada; Fourteen: Magical Therapy: An Anthropological Investigation of Contemporary Satanism; Fifteen: Teenage Satanism as Oppositional Youth Subculture; F: Violence and New Religious Movements; Sixteen: Sects and Violence: Factors Enhancing the Volatility of Marginal Religious Movements; Seventeen: The Apocalypse at Jonestown; Eighteen: Cult Extremism: The Reduction of Normative Dissonance; G: The Cultural Significance of New Religious Movements; Nineteen: Women’s ‘Cocoon Work’ in New Religious Movements: Sexual Experimentation and Feminine Rites of Passage; Twenty: The New Age Movement and the Pentecostal/Charismatic Revival: Distinct Yet Parallel Phases of a Fourth Great Awakening?; Twenty-One: Cultural Consequences of Cults; Appendix: Cults and the Internet; Twenty-Two: NRMS, the ACM, and the WWW: A Guide for Beginners
Biography
Lorne Dawson
