Yearning to Belong: Discovering a New Religious Movement, by John Paul Healy. Ashgate Publishing, Ashgate New Religions Series, 2010. $99.95. ISBN 978- 1-4094-1941-9 (hardcover).

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-110
Author(s):  
Inga Bårdsen Tøllefsen
Keyword(s):  
Religious Movement ◽  
New Religions ◽  
Ashgate Publishing

Book review.

Extraterrestrial Exegesis: The Raëëlian Movement as a Biblical Religion

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 14-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene V. Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Bible Study ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
The Bible ◽  
New Religions ◽  
Biblical Religion

Interpretation of the Bible has played a central role in the origins and development of the Raëëlian movement. Claude Vorilhon's first encounter with the "Elohim" was immediately followed by an intensive week of Bible study that gave him a new identity as the messianic prophet "Raëël," a new direction for his life as the earthly ambassador of the Elohim, and a new doctrine that would serve as the intellectual foundation of a new religious movement. The Raëëlian movement and other new religions in which interpretation of the Bible figure prominently do not originate one-sidedly in a "cultic milieu" or "occulture" that is divorced from the broad biblical tradition. Rather, they represent creative blendings of biblical and other sources. Part of the attractiveness of the Bible for new religions is that it contains and legitimizes multiple examples of successful religious innovation.

Shifting Paradigms and Mediating Media: Redefining a New Religion as "Rational" in Contemporary Society

2007 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 54-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christal Whelan
Keyword(s):  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Religious Movement ◽  
Politics Of Representation ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
New Religions ◽  
Past Life ◽  
New Religion ◽  
Mediated Representation

Japanese new religions sometimes undergo a radical alteration in doctrine or orientation during the course of their development. This article focuses on the politics of representation within the deliberate transformation of a Japanese new religious movement known as GLA or God Light Association from a popular shamanistic neo-Buddhist form of religiosity to an increasingly "rational" and psychological religion. This paradigm shift revolved around the contested practice of past-life glossolalia promoted by the religion's founder as proof of reincarnation. Direct or mediated representation of this phenomenon, serving initially as a locus of power, came to be viewed negatively as expressive of GLA's roots with Japan's folk religious past. Unsuitable for the new secularized target clientele in an age of globalization, representations of this behavior and the man who fostered it were gradually suppressed and history was re-inscribed.

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