scholarly journals Reframing the History of New Religious Movements

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-12
Author(s):  
Michael Driedger ◽  
Johannes C. Wolfart
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Conceptual Frameworks ◽  
New Religions ◽  
Disciplinary Practice ◽  
History Of

In this special issue of Nova Religio four historians of medieval and early modern Christianities offer perspectives on basic conceptual frameworks widely employed in new religions studies, including modernization and secularization, radicalism/violent radicalization, and diversity/diversification. Together with a response essay by J. Gordon Melton, these articles suggest strong possibilities for renewed and ongoing conversation between scholars of “old” and “new” religions. Unlike some early discussions, ours is not aimed simply at questioning the distinction between old and new religions itself. Rather, we think such conversation between scholarly fields holds the prospect of productive scholarly surprise and perspectival shifts, especially via the disciplinary practice of historiographical criticism.

New Religious Movements and Science

2011 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 4-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin E. Zeller
Keyword(s):  
Modern Society ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Western Science ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
New Religions ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
Scientific Systems

The notion or idea of science, quite aside from actual scientific enterprises, has achieved tremendous cultural power and prestige in modern society. The four studies in this special issue of Nova Religio on science and new religious movements indicate not only this newfound power, but also the contentious nature of its definition as well as its limits. The four articles reveal how founders, leaders and practitioners of new religious movements seek the authoritative mantle of science, and with it a perceived legitimacy, as well as challenge normative (Western) approaches to science assumed in much of modern society. In fact, these new religions generally seek to supplant normative Western science with the alternative religious-scientific systems they champion.

New Religious Movements in the Long Nineteenth Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-17
Author(s):  
Lydia Willsky-Ciollo
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Foreign Missions ◽  
New Religions ◽  
The Impact

This introduction provides a brief overview of the period known as the “long nineteenth century,” which played host to and helped to shape numerous new religious movements. Highlighting the impact and occasional convergence of various political, social, and religious movements and events in both the United States and globally, this essay seeks to show that the examination of new religious movements in the nineteenth century offers a means of applying scholarship in new religious movements to religions that may be defined as “old,” while simultaneously opening new ways of understanding new religions more broadly. In the process, this overview provides background for the articles included in this special issue of Nova Religio, which explore subjects including religious utopianism; gender, politics, and Pentecostalism; Mormonism and foreign missions; and the relationships of new religious movements to visual art.

Strange Gods in a Great Southern Land

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-30
Author(s):  
Bernard Doherty
Keyword(s):  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Global History ◽  
Societal Response ◽  
New Religions ◽  
History Of

Between 1960 and 2000 Australia witnessed four waves of “cult controversy.” This article provides a historical overview of these controversies. The four historical vignettes presented demonstrate the significance of Australia in the wider global history of the “cult wars” and some of the local societal reactions occasioned by various home grown and international new religious movements that have proved controversial. This article identifies a series of the key episodes and periods that might serve as historical landmarks for the writing of a more fulsome history of new religions in Australia, introduces to a scholarly audience some of the important individuals involved in these Australian controversies, and highlights the key new religions and cult-watching groups whose interactions have collectively shaped the Australian societal response over this period.

Introduction: New Religions in Eastern Europe

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 8-12
Author(s):  
Milda Ališauskienė
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Guest Editor ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Scholarly Research ◽  
New Religions ◽  
Branding Strategies

The introduction to this special issue on new religions in Eastern Europe provides a historical background on the place of new religious movements in the region during the Soviet and post-Soviet era. This includes the varieties of new and alternative religions active in these societies and how this changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The guest editor notes several main directions of scholarly research focusing on these new religions and summarizes the four articles included in this special issue, which focus on the Lithuanian neoshamanic community, the pyramid of Merkinė in Lithuania, marketing and branding strategies of contemporary spirituality movements in Estonia, and the Last Testament Church in Siberia, Russia.

scholarly journals New Religious Movements before Modernity?

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 13-37
Author(s):  
Andreas Pietsch ◽  
Sita Steckel
Keyword(s):  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
New Religions ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of

Can the study of new religious movements be extended historically towards a longue durée history of religious innovation? Several sociological theories suggest that fundamental differences between premodern and modern religious configurations preclude this, pointing to a lack of religious diversity and freedom of religion in premodern centuries. Written from a historical perspective, this article questions this view and suggests historical religious movements within Christianity as possible material for a long-term perspective. Using the Franciscans and the Family of Love as examples, it points out possible themes for productive interdisciplinary research. One suggestion is to study the criticisms surrounding premodern new religious movements, which might be used to analyze the historical differentiation of religion. Another avenue is the study of premodern terminologies and concepts for religious communities, which could provide a historical horizon for the ongoing debate about the typology of new religions.

An Initial Response to the Call for Reframing the History of New Religious Movements

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 88-95
Author(s):  
J. Gordon Melton
Keyword(s):  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Initial Response ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Methodological Issues ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
New Religions ◽  
History Of

In response to Nova Religio articles by Andreas Pietsch and Sita Steckel, Michael Driedger, and Johannes C. Wolfart calling for a reframing of new religious movements by new religions scholars, agreement is offered that new religions studies will be well served by incorporating insights from scholars of new religious movements and sectarian movements of the late medieval and Reformation eras, as well as by recasting assumptions that associate apocalyptic movements with violence. It is also suggested that a more sophisticated assessment of pluralism in previous centuries and more attention to methodological issues will provide a firmer foundation for current claims of a growing religious diversity in the contemporary world.

scholarly journals Romantic Indigenizing of New Religions in Contemporary Europe Critical Methodological Remarks

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bjørn Ola Tafjord
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
New Religions ◽  
Indigenous Religions

Romanticisms, not colonialisms, drive the indigenizing and the religionizing in the cases described and analyzed in this special issue. In what follows, I shall explain what I mean by this observation and suggest ways to think about it critically. The task of this essay is to highlight entangled methodological and political contexts for the discussion about “indigenizing” that Graham Harvey opened in his introduction, a discussion that the different case studies then continued and exemplified. Inspired by Paul Christopher Johnson’s theorizing about indigenizing (Johnson 2002a), Harvey asks whether it is useful to employ the concepts “indigenous” and “indigenizing” in studies of contemporary movements in Europe: British Druids (studied by Suzanne Owen), Italian shamans and witches (by Angela Puca), The English Bear Tribe (by Graham Harvey), Irish or Celtic Pagans (by Jenny Butler), English Powwow enthusiasts (by Christina Welch), Anastasians in Lithuania and Russia (by Rasa Pranskevi?i?t?), and Goddess devotees in Glastonbury (by Amy Whitehead). These are movements (and scholars) that have been associated with the study of paganisms and the study of new religious movements, but usually not with the study of indigenous religions (except Harvey and Owen who have worked extensively in both fields of research).

The Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
New Religions ◽  
New Age Movement ◽  
Book Award ◽  
The Status ◽  
Social Scientific

The first edition ofThe Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movementsappeared in early 2004. At the time, it was a much-needed overview of a rapidly-expanding area of study; it received recognition in the form of aChoicebook award. The second edition brings this task up to date. In addition to updating most of the original topics, the new edition takes in more topics by expanding the volume from 22 to 32 chapters, and enlarges the scope of the book by doubling the number of contributors from outside of North America. Following an introductory section devoted to social-scientific approaches to New Religious Movements (NRMs), the second section focuses on what has been uppermost in the minds of the general public, namely the controversies that have surrounded these groups. The third section examines certain themes in the study of NRMs, such as the status of children and women in such movements. The fourth section presents religious studies approaches by looking at NRM mythologies, rituals and the like. The final section covers the subfields that have grown out of NRM studies and become specializations in their own right, from the study of modern Paganism to the study of the New Age Movement. Finally, the present volume has a thematic focus; readers interested in specific NRMs are advised to consult the second edition of James R. Lewis and Jesper Aa. Petersen’s edited volume,Controversial New Religions(Oxford University Press 2014).

New Religious Movements in Brazil

2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Selka
Keyword(s):  
Religious Practice ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Evangelical Christianity ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Race Ethnicity ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
Religious Landscape ◽  
Late Modern

This article provides an overview of the Brazilian religious landscape and an introduction to this special issue on new religious movements in Brazil. I stress how the Brazilian religious landscape, although often imagined as a place of religious syncretism and cultural mixture, is crosscut by an array of boundaries, tensions and antagonisms, including ones grounded in race and class. The article outlines the major topics and problems taken up by the contributors to this issue, including appropriation across lines of race, ethnicity and class; the growing influence of evangelical Christianity in Latin America and beyond; esoteric religious practice in the late modern era; and questions of purity and authenticity, syncretism and anti-syncretism. Through their engagement with these themes, the articles in this issue contribute to a number of important discussions that relate not only to the study of religion in Brazil but to the study of new religious movements in general.

The Study of Hindu New Religious Movements

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-19
Author(s):  
Gene R. Thursby
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Meditation ◽  
Social World ◽  
Religious Movements ◽  
New Religious Movements ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Social Harmony ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Arya Samaj

The category of Hindu new religious movements is conventional and useful, but has imprecise boundaries. Scholars tend to include within it some groups that have claimed they are not Hindu (Arya Samaj, Ramakrishna Mission) or not religious (Transcendental Meditation). Within its wide range are world-affirming groups dedicated to transforming the physical and social world as well as world-transcending groups that find the status of the world doubtful and their purpose at another level or in another realm. The four articles in this special issue of Nova Religio on Hindu new religious movements represent several aspects of this category, and the potential for accommodation of basic differences, social harmony, and even world-transcendence.

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