Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America

This book is a fairly brief (about 300 pgs) survey of various modern religious/spiritual groups originating in America. Many of the groups are labeled as "cults" by the authors, which they define as, "a group offering an alternative to the dominant spiritual tradition, which is small, has authoritative and charismatic leadership, offers powerful subjective experiences which meet personal needs, is separatist, and claims a relation to a legitimating tradition." Groups surveyed include the Theosophical Society, Anthroposophy, Rosicrucianism, the "I AM" movement, the Church Universal and Triumphant, the "Liberal Catholic Church," Spiritualist churches, Flying Saucer groups, the Aetherius Society, Gurdjieff groups, Scientology, Wicca, Satanism, the Self-Realization Fellowship, Transcendental Meditation, the bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, Sai Baba, Meher baba, Eckankar, the Unification Church, the Black Muslims, as well as actual religous groups such as Baha'i, Zen, and Tibetan Buddhism. They also present a "Reading Selection" (i.e., an excerpt from one of the writings of the movement) at the end of most chapters, which really helps give one a genuine "flavor" of the group. Most of the groups receive only a few pages of survey, but the authors include a lot of information in those pages. The revised edition published in 1988 is somewhat "dated" now, but is still useful for students of such groups (although you will obviously have to obtain more detailed treatments of any group you have a particular interest in).