Streaming Video
- JonestownThis New York Times Critic's Pick tells the story of the people who followed cult leader Jim Jones to the remote jungles of Guyana, South America, in a misbegotten quest to build an ideal society.
- Waiting for Armageddon America’s 50-million strong Evangelical community is convinced that the world’s future is foretold in Biblical prophecy, from the Rapture to the Battle of Armageddon. Waiting for Armageddon explores this apocalyptic worldview, from the homefront in America to the future battlefield of Israel. By weaving Christian, Zionist, and Jewish perspectives along with telling archival materials, this eyeopening film also probes the potentially explosive alliance between Evangelical Christians and Israel...an alliance that may set the stage for what one Evangelical leader calls 'World War III.'
- TEDTalk: How Cults Rewire the BrainDiane Benscoter spent five years as a “Moonie”—an active member of Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. Now, having put the cult behind her, she searches for ways to combat radical ideologies and their potentially deadly consequences. In this TEDTalk, she shares an insider’s view of the religious extremist’s mentality and proposes a new way to think about today’s most troubling conflicts.
Stories
Books
End-Time Visions: The Road to Armageddon by
Covers the history of theories of the end of the world, how contemporary cult leaders approach the coming of the millenium, and how the Bible is sometimes misunderstood as forecasting specific dates.
Call Number: BT876 .A22 1998ISBN: 1568581041Publication Date: 1998-05-01
Cults, Religion, and Violence by
This explores the question of when and why violence by and against new religious cults erupts and whether and how such dramatic conflicts can be foreseen, managed and averted. The authors, leading international experts on religious movements and violent behavior, focus on the four major episodes of cult violence during the last decade: the tragic conflagration that engulfed the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas; the deadly sarin gas attack by the Aum Shinrikyo in Tokyo; the murder-suicides by the Solar Temple in Switzerland and Canada; and the collective suicide by the members of Heaven's Gate. They explore the dynamics leading to these dramatic episodes in North America, Europe, and Asia, and offer insights into the general relationship between violence and religious cults in contemporary society. The authors conclude that these events usually involve some combination of internal and external dynamics through which a new religious movement and society become polarized.
Call Number: BL65 .V55 C85 2002ISBN: 0521660645Publication Date: 2002-05-06
Revisiting Jonestown: An Interdisciplinary Study of Cults by
Revisiting Jonestown covers three main topics: the psycho-biography of Jim Jones (the leader of the suicidal community) from the new perspective of Prenatal Psychology and transgenerational trauma, the story of his Peoples Temple, with emphasis on what kind of leadership and membership were responsible for their tragic end, and the interpretation of death rituals by religious cults as regression to primordial stages of human evolution, when a series of genetic mutations changed the destiny of Homo Sapiens, at the dawn of religion and human awareness. A pattern of collective suicide is finally identified, making it possible to foresee and try to prevent its tragic repetition. At the same time, through an artistic editorial work on original images from the Peoples Temple files, a sort of Multimedia Psychotherapy is subliminally delivered in order to help the mourning of the victims of Jonestown, to whose memory the book is dedicated.
Call Number: BP605 .P46 N466 2018ISBN: 1498552692Publication Date: 2017-12-13
Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History by
Are religious fringe movements a recent phenomeon in American history? Are widespread fears of mass suicides, sexual abuse, and brainwashing in cults justified? Do marginalized religious groups play any positive role in American spiritual life? Do the panics over such groups follow anydiscernible pattern?Phillip Jenkins gives fascinating--and surprising--answers to these and many other questions in Mystics and Messiahs, the first full account of cults and anti-cult scares in American history. Jenkins shows that, contrary to popular belief, cults were by no means an invention of the 1960s. In fact,most of the frightening images and stereotypes surrounding fringe religious movements are traceable to the mid-nineteenth century when Mormons, Freemasons, and even Catholics were vehemently denounced for supposed ritualistic violence, fraud, and sexual depravity. As Charles Ferguson observed in1928, "America has always been the sanctuary of amazing cults." But America has also been the home of an often hysterical anti-cult backlash. Jenkins provides an insightful new analysis of why cults arouse such fear and hatred both in the secular world and in mainstream churches, many ofwhich--Baptists, Quakers, Pentecostals, and Methodists--were themselves originally regarded as cults. Most importantly, Jenkins argues that an accurate historical perspective is urgently needed if we are to avoid the kind of catastrophic confrontation that occurred in Waco or the ruinous prosecutionof imagined Satanic cults in the 1980s.While not ignoring genuine instances of aberrant behavior, Mystics and Messiahs goes beyond the vast edifice of myth, distortion, and hype to reveal the true characteristics of religious fringe movements and why they inspire such fierce antagonism.
Call Number: BL2525 .J46 2000ISBN: 0195127447Publication Date: 2000-04-06
A Guide to Cults and New Religions by Call Number: BL2530.U6 G84 1983ISBN: 0877848378Publication Date: 1983-03-01
