Across America and the world dangerous New Age cults and religious groups are growing in strength and numbers. Here is the authoritative guide to the New Age cults and religions infecting and threatening our society. It carefully analyzes these groups and provides answers to the questions most commonly asked about them.

Most new or alternative religious are gravely misunderstood by members of the religious mainstream. Labeled cults or sects, groups and their members are often ridiculed or otherwise disregarded as weird and potentially dangerous by the populace at large. Despite their efforts at educating the general public, the various anti- and counter-cult activists have in fact promoted much more mis-understanding than accurate understanding of the religious lives of some of their fellow citizens. Consequently, they have helped to create a very hostile environment for anyone whose religious practices do not fit within a so-called mainstream. This set rectifies the situation by presenting accurate, comprehensive, authoritative and accessible accounts of various new and alternative religious movements that have been and are active in American society, and it addresses ways of understanding new and alternative religions within a broader context. Determining what actually constitutes a new or alternative religion is a subject of constant debate. Questions arise as to a new faith's legitimacy, beliefs, methods of conversion, and other facets of a religious movement's viability and place in a given culture. How a religion gains recognition by the mainstream, which often labels such new movements as cults, is fraught with difficulty, tension, and fear. Here, experts delineate the boundaries and examine the various groups, beliefs, movements, and other issues related to new faiths and alternative beliefs. Readers will come away with a fuller understanding of the religious landscape in America today. Volume 1: History and Controversies discusses the foundations of new and alternative religions in the United States and addresses the controversies that surround them. This volume helps readers better understand what makes a new or alternative belief system a religion and the issues involved. Volume 2: Jewish and Christian Traditions explores the various new religions that have grown out of these two Abrahamic faiths. Groups such as the Shakers, the People's Temple, the Branch Davidians, Jehovah's Witnesses and others are examined. Volume 3: Metaphysical, New Age, and Neopagan Movements looks at Shamanism, Spiritualism, Wicca, and Paganism, among other movements, as they have developed and grown in the U.S. These faiths have found new and devoted followers yet are often misunderstood. Volume 4: Asian Traditions focuses on those new and alternative religions that have been inspired by Asian religious traditions. From Baha'i to Soka Gakkai, from Adidam to the Vedanta Society, contributors look at a full range of groups practicing and worshiping in the U.S. today. Volume 5: African Diaspora Traditions and Other American Innovations examines the various traditions linked to the African diaspora such as Rastafarianism, Santeria, and the Nation of Islam, alongside traditions that are truly American incarnations like Scientology, UFO religions, and Heaven's Gate. Some of the new and alternative religions covered in these pages include: ; Shamanism ; Wicca ; Black Israelites ; Santeria ; Scientology ; Elan Vital ; Hare Krishna ; Soka Gakkai ; and many more

Across America and the world dangerous New Age cults and religious groups are growing in strength and numbers. Here is the authoritative guide to the New Age cults and religions infecting and threatening our society. It carefully analyzes these groups and provides answers to the questions most commonly asked about them.

A growing chorus of voices has suggested that the world’s religions may become critical actors as the climate crisis unfolds, particularly in light of international paralysis on the issue. In recent years, many faiths have begun to address climate change and its consequences for human societies, especially the world’s poor. This is the first volume to use social science to examine how religions are helping to address one of the most significant and far-reaching challenges of our time. While there is a growing literature in theology and ethics about climate change and religion, little research has been previously published about the ways in which religious institutions, groups and individuals are responding to the problem of climate change. Seventeen research-driven chapters are written by sociologists, anthropologists, geographers and other social scientists. This book explores what effects religions are having, what barriers they are running into or creating, and what this means for the global struggle to address climate change.

Ruth A. Tucker's book is a comprehensive survey of all the major alternative religions in the United States, including the new groups since the 1960s.

Many seemingly strange questions on yoga, salvation, religious pluralism, and so forth have been actively debated among members of a small but influential group of evangelical apologists known as the Christian countercult movement. This Element explores the history of this movement from its origins in the anti-heresy writings of the early church to its modern development as a reaction to religious pluralism in North America. It contrasts the apologetic Christian countercult movement with its secular anticult counterpart and explains how faith-based opposition both to new religious movements and to non-Christian religions will only deepen as religious pluralism increases. It provides a concise understanding of the two principal goals of Christian countercult apologetics: support for the evangelization of non-Christian believers and maintenance for the perceived superiority of the evangelical Christian worldview.

From Hare Krishna to the Latter-Day Saints, and from Jehovah's Witnesses to the New Age, religious pluralism in North American presents evangelical Protestantism with significant challenges. Declaring newer religious groups cults, aberrant sects, and heretical religions, the Christian countercult movement has warned that these groups represent a threat to society. In ^IBearing False Witness?^R Cowan considers the Christian countercult as a whole, locating it in sociological perspective as an entity distinct from the secular anti-cult. Through his analysis, the author argues that the primary purpose of the countercult movement is to reinforce and repair the Christian worldview when it appears threatened by the advent of alternative religious traditions. This unique analysis of the Christian countercult helps explain why conservative Christian responses to competing religious movements have taken the form that they have in addition to how those responses are carried out. Unlike the anti-cult movement, which is concerned with removing individuals from cults and returning them to their families, the Christian countercult movement, according to the author, attempts not only to remove cultists from the negative influences of the cults to which they belong, but also to insure that they will join the particular version of Christianity adhered to by the countercultists themselves. Beginning with the countercult's early history, the author provides an historical account of the movement and its present activities. Since the rise of new religious movements, the growing interest in religions imported from outside North America, and the broadening of the religious marketplace continues to grow, understanding the Christian countercult and its presence as a countervailing pressure to these increasingly socioreligious dynamics becomes ever more important.

Our children are under assault by the New Age. For over three decades the New Age leadership has plotted and worked to ravage an entire generation. This book explains the occult inroads into our schools, movies, kids' books, cartoons, at NASA (our space agency), the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, and even in Sunday School curricula! It also shows how our teenagers are brought into bondage through Satan worship and witchcraft. Ravaged by the New Age provides an Action Plan with positive steps parents can take to protect their children from the New Age child abusers.

Lewis, the best-selling author of Prophecy 2000, shares fascinating research into the diabolical source of flying saucers and the hunger of a society looking to the great beyond for answers to its immense problems. Why are supermarket tabloids filled with wise messages from space, detailing the true nature of God and alternate roads to salvation? Are these aliens demonic counterfeits?

In Cyberhenge, Douglas E. Cowan brings together two fascinating and virtually unavoidable phenomena of contemporary life--the Internet and the new religious movement of Neopaganism. For growing numbers of Neopagans-Wiccans, Druids, Goddess-worshippers, and others--the Internet provides an environment alive with possibilities for invention, innovation, and imagination. Fr om angel channeling, biorhythms, and numerology to e-covens and cybergroves where neophytes can learn everything from the Wiccan Rede to spellworking, Cowan illuminates how and why Neopaganism is using Internet technology in fascinating new ways as a platform for invention of new religious traditions and the imaginative performance of ritual. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of new religious movements, and for anyone interested in the intersections of technology and faith.