This book provides new theoretical and methodological insights for understanding and interpreting ANRMs and African-derived religions in diaspora. Contributors focus on groups and movements drawn from Christian, Islamic, Jewish and African-derived religious movements and explore their provenance and patterns of emergence, their belief systems and ritual practices. The book offers new insights into how ANRMs can be better defined, approached, and interpreted by scholars, policy makers and media practitioners alike.
The growing pace of international migration, technological revolution in media and travel generate circumstances that provide opportunities for the mobility of African new religious movements (ANRMs) within Africa and beyond. ANRMs are furthering their self-assertion and self-insertion into the religious landscapes of Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Their growing presence and public visibility seem to be more robustly captured by the popular media than by scholars of NRMs, historians of religion and social scientists, a tendency that has probably shaped the public mental picture and understanding of the phenomena. This book provides new theoretical and methodological insights for understanding and interpreting ANRMs and African-derived religions in diaspora. Contributors focus on individual groups and movements drawn from Christian, Islamic, Jewish and African-derived religious movements and explore their provenance and patterns of emergence; their belief systems and ritual practices; their public/civic roles; group self-definition; public perceptions and responses; tendencies towards integration/segregation; organisational networks; gender orientations and the implications of interactions within and between the groups and with the host societies. The book includes contributions from scholars and religious practitioners, thus offering new insights into how ANRMs can be better defined, approached, and interpreted by scholars, policy makers, and media practitioners alike.
The growing pace of international migration, technological revolution in media and travel generate circumstances that provide opportunities for the mobility of African new religious movements (ANRMs) within Africa and beyond. ANRMs are furthering their self-assertion and self-insertion into the religious landscapes of Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Their growing presence and public visibility seem to be more robustly captured by the popular media than by scholars of NRMs, historians of religion and social scientists, a tendency that has probably shaped the public mental picture and understanding of the phenomena. This book provides new theoretical and methodological insights for understanding and interpreting ANRMs and African-derived religions in diaspora. Contributors focus on individual groups and movements drawn from Christian, Islamic, Jewish and African-derived religious movements and explore their provenance and patterns of emergence; their belief systems and ritual practices; their public/civic roles; group self-definition; public perceptions and responses; tendencies towards integration/segregation; organisational networks; gender orientations and the implications of interactions within and between the groups and with the host societies. The book includes contributions from scholars and religious practitioners, thus offering new insights into how ANRMs can be better defined, approached, and interpreted by scholars, policy makers, and media practitioners alike.
There are many different ways in which minority religions and counselling may interact. In some cases there can be antagonism between counselling services and minority religions, with each suspecting they are ideologically threatened by the other, but it can be argued that the most common relationship is one of ignorance – mental health professionals do not pay much attention to religion and often do not ask or consider their client’s religious affiliation. To date, the understanding of this relationship has focused on the ‘anti-cult movement’ and the perceived need for members of minority religions to undergo some form of ‘exit counselling’. In line with the series, this volume takes a non-judgemental approach and instead highlights the variety of issues, religious groups and counselling approaches that are relevant at the interface between minority religion and counselling. The volume is divided into four parts: Part I offers perspectives on counselling from different professions; Part II offers chapters from the field leaders directly involved in counselling former members of minority religions; Part III offers unique personal accounts by members and former members of a number of different new religions; while Part IV offers chapters on some of the most pertinent current issues in the counselling/minority religions fields, written by new and established academics. In every section, the volume seeks to explore different permutations of the counsellor-client relationship when religious identities are taken into account. This includes not only ‘secular’ therapists counselling former members of religion, but the complexities of the former member turned counsellor, as well as counselling practised both within religious movements and by religious movements that offer counselling services to the ‘outside’ world.
This volume, bringing together work by scholars from Europe, East Asia, North America, and West Africa, investigates transnational religious spaces in a comparative manner by juxtaposing East Asian and African examples. It highlights flows of ideas, actors, and organizations out of, into, or within a given continental space. These flows are patterned mainly by colonialism or migration. The book also examines cases where the transnational space in question encompasses both East Asia and Africa, notably in the development of Japanese new religions in Africa. Most of the studies are located in the present; a few go back to the late nineteenth century. The volume is rounded off by Thomas Tweed’s systematic reflections on categories for the study of transnationalism; his chapter "Flows and Dams" critically weighs the metaphorical language we use to think, speak, and write about transnational religious spaces.
Although humans have always migrated, the present phenomenon of mass migration is unprecedented in scale and global in reach. Understanding migration and migrants has become increasingly relevant for world Christianity. This volume identifies and addresses several key topics in the discourse of world Christianity and migration. Senior and emerging scholars and researchers of migration from all regions of the world contribute chapters on central issues, including the feminization of international migration, the theology of migration, south-south migration networks, the connection between world Christianity, migration, and civic responsibility, and the complicated relationship between migration, identity and citizenship. It seeks to give voice particularly to migrant narratives as important sources for public reasoning and theology in the 21st century.
'Cult Wars' in Historical Perspective provides a broad characterization of the shifting religious contours over the past several decades. Offering an assessment of several important topics in the study of new religions, this book explores developments in well-known groups such as the Unification movement, The Family International (Children of God), the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), and the Church of Scientology. Bringing together both insiders and outsiders from various academic disciplines and personal perspectives, this book takes account of the ways in which the cult question is defined and addressed in different countries. It offers a vivid depiction of how the cult wars or cult controversies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries first took shape; the transformation of deeply entrenched positions on cults and sects as at least some members of new groups, cult watchers, and academics entered into serious and sustained conversations about topics of mutual concern; the shifting foci and concerns of the general public, law enforcement and the courts, and academics in various countries; and the complex histories of individual groups in which many dramatic transformations have occurred despite their comparatively short life spans.
This revised and expanded second edition of Routledge International Handbook of Migration Studies provides a comprehensive basis for understanding the complexity and patterns of international migration. Despite increased efforts to limit its size and consequences, migration has wide-ranging impacts upon social, environmental, economic, political and cultural life in countries of origin and settlement. Such transformations impact not only those who are migrating, but those who are left behind, as well as those who live in the areas where migrants settle. Featuring forty-six essays written by leading international and multidisciplinary scholars, this new edition showcases evolving research and theorizing around refugees and forced migrants, new migration paths through Central Asia and the Middle East, the condition of statelessness and South to South migration. New chapters also address immigrant labor and entrepreneurship, skilled migration, ethnic succession, contract labor and informal economies. Uniquely among texts in the subject area, the Handbook provides a six-chapter compendium of methodologies for studying international migration and its impacts. Written in a clear and direct style, this Handbook offers a contemporary integrated resource for students and scholars from the perspectives of social science, humanities, journalism and other disciplines.
Offering an assesment of the state-of-the-field of the study of NRMs, this book considers the analytical tools for the study of new or minority religions and draws on the perspectives of diverse academic disciplines. Its essays focus on individual groups in a variety of geographical settings and review the past of particular groups in order to extrapolate future developments. They cover new religions that have persisted well past the first generation, such as the Mormon Church, the Christian Scientists, and the Jehovah's Witnesses, and groups with comparatively shorter histories such as various forms of contemporary Paganism, Soka Gakkai, and the Diamond Way Buddhist group.
