New Religious Movements and Comparative Religion
Hammer, Olav (University of Southern Denmark) / Swartz, Karen (Abo Akademi University, Finland)
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 mat...
