Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Cults

This study considers a new kind of cosmopolitanism located in an...

This study considers a new kind of cosmopolitanism located in an...

This nonsensationalist encyclopedia examines contemporary images of the devil and sorts out the many different forms these images take. Although much of the myths relating to Satan derive directly or indirectly from the Christian tradition, the key sources of diabolical images today are horror movies, heavy metal music, and conservative Christian literature.

This encyclopedia gives a brief overview depicting the history and transformation of the meaning of the Prince of Darkness, and 300 entries cover subjects like the angel of death, backward masking (messages revealed when songs are...

The author, Gilbert Tripp, focuses on the beliefs and practices of many religious groups in his easy-to-read, thought-provoking book. He slowly and persuasively makes his way through the various points in a friendly manner. This book is ideal for personal or classroom study. At an affordable price of only $14.95, it should be in every library.

Some of the subjects and sub-subjects covered are:

Chapter One: From the Beginning; The Creation Account vs. Myths of Cultures Surrounding the Hebrews...

This book investigates the relationship between cult and ethics in the book of Isaiah. Part I attempts to revise some of the common Old Testament views on prophets and cult. After inspecting cultic concepts such as sacrifice, purity and impurity, holiness, and the Promised Land, it suggests that the priestly and prophetic understandings of the role of the Ancient Israelite cult were essentially the same. This general proposition is then tested on the book of Isaiah in Part II: each chapter there analyses the key passage on cult and ethics in the three main parts of the book, namely, Isa...

The deaths in the Jonestown community of northwestern Guyana on November 18, 1978, marked the largest non-natural loss of American civilian life before September 11, 2001, yet the event has been largely forgotten. In Jonestown: A Vexation, poet Carmen Gillespie presents a more subjective version of the Jonestown story than the iconic photographs of the event, which showed 900 plus people, more than 250 of whom were children, laying face down and forever voiceless. Gillespie draws on her own memories of living in Guyana's capitol, Georgetown, as a child to imagine the hopes, aspirations,...

Images and inscriptions on monuments can show us how priests and cult personnel saw themselves and were viewed by others, illuminating the social and political identity of these figures within their polis. Dedications and donations by cult personnel, and the honours that they earned, demonstrate their claim on the city's attention and their financial power. The cityscape itself came to be shaped, in varying intensities and forms, by statues in honour of cult personnel, set up by relatives, fellow citizens and other groups. This set of cultural records, analysed in the studies presented...

In the hands of Johnson and Wilentz, the strange tale of Matthias opens a fascinating window into the turbulent movements of the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening--movements that swept up great numbers of evangelical Americans and gave rise to new sects like the Mormons. Into this teeming environment walked a down-and-out carpenter named Robert Matthews, who announced himself as Matthias, prophet of...

This brief apologetic was borne of discussions I had with several Jehovah’s Witnesses who graced my doorstep over the span of a few years, not many years ago, and of the subsequent conversations we enjoyed at a nearby Kingdom Hall. I learned from those discussions that the popular literature which addresses JW doctrine doesn’t adequately appraise the effect their view of Christ has on the biblical metanarrative.

The typical approach is insufficient primarily because it fails to address the core issue which is the distinctive proxy status that Jehovah gives to Jesus...