ABSTRACT
Although many popular treatments of new religious movements, “cults,” or “sectes” (in French) or “sektes” (in German) have treated them as distinctively contemporary fads that would quickly fade away once their members wised up or their chicanery was exposed, more historically oriented studies of new, alternative, or minority religions have shown, as J. Gordon Melton once put it, that “the production of new religions is a normal, ongoing process in a free society” (Melton, 2007: 109). Therefore, since it is likely that new religions will always be with us, so will their study. The essays gathered in this volume attempt both to chart a more theoretically sophisticated course for the study of new and minority religions and to anticipate the changes in store for a variety of new religious groups in various social settings.
