How Organizations Are Grouped

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The organizations gathered here fall into a few recurring shapes rather than one uniform kind. Religious governing bodies and orders sit at the center: a national church body, a monastic order, a Sufi order or a movement, each with its own leadership and its own relationship to the wider tradition it belongs to. Around that center sit two kinds of agency a religious body maintains rather than is: a relief, development or humanitarian organization it funds and staffs, from a denomination's own overseas relief and rescue arm to a religious community's disaster response network, and an educational or research institution, a seminary, a learned society or a laboratory, that a tradition or its adherents founded to study or transmit something beyond the institution itself. A smaller group are government bodies: state waqf authorities, ministries of religious affairs and comparable offices through which a government administers religious property or oversight rather than a religious body administering its own. Reading an organization's own kind label alongside the denomination or religion it links to is usually enough to place it in this scheme without needing a separate taxonomy, though a handful sit deliberately outside every religious tradition, a learned society studying paranormal claims or a government agency named only as an investigator of them.