New Religious Movements and Comparative Religion

This Element presents a range of similarities between contemporary NRMs and more traditional religions.

Olav Hammer (Author), Karen Swartz (Author)

9781009014595, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 February 2024

80 pages
22.8 x 15 x 0.5 cm, 0.13 kg

This Element provides an introduction to a number of less frequently explored approaches based upon the comparative study of religions. New religions convey origin myths, present their particular views of history, and craft Endtime scenarios. Their members carry out a vast and diverse array of ritual activities. They produce large corpuses of written texts and designate a subset of these as a sacrosanct canon. They focus their attention on material objects that can range from sacred buildings to objects from the natural world that are treated in ritualized fashion. The reason for this fundamental similarity between older and newer religions is briefly explored in terms of the cognitive processes that underlie religious concepts and practices. A final section returns to the issue of how such shared processes take specific shapes in the context of modern, Western societies.

1. Introduction
2. Myths
3. Rituals
4. Material objects in new religious movements
5. Texts
6. New religions in comparative perspective
References.

Subject Areas: Religion: general [HRA]