A comparative, multidisciplinary interrogation of how people across the world become extremists of all kinds, and how different scholarly fields study and theorize this process.

Cults examines the history and current status of cults across the United States, Europe, and East Asia. Focusing on the principal controversial religions and movements that have attracted major media…

Written by an expert in new religions, this book contains twenty articles that cover the many variations of UFO-based religions. It aims to demonstrate that there are persistent and salient…

Provides an overview of neo-paganism from the Goddess to magic and rituals, from history and ethics to the relationship of neo-paganism to Christianity.

Although speech is the most natural form of communication between humans, most people find using speech to communicate with machines anything but natural. Drawing from psychology, human-computer interaction, linguistics, and…

The study of New Religious Movement (NRMs) is one of the fastest growing areas of religious studies. In this title, core chapters deal with such central issues as conversion, the…

This volume focuses on the formation of Falun Gong, and Li Hongzhi’s teachings about ‘spiritual warfare’, and how these have motivated practitioners to deliberately seek brutalization and martyrdom.

In the domain of religion, historically verifiable traditions coexist with recent innovations whose origins are spuriously projected back into time. This book examines the phenomenon of ‘invented traditions’ in religions…