Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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This page groups organizations by whether they are still active today. Wikipedia notes that "more than 50 associations of the Jehovah's Witnesses have tax-free status" in France alone, evidence of a currently active and registered body. Browsing this way lets a visitor tell a live organization apart from one that has since dissolved.

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Ten Movements Spanning Reform Synthesis and Interfaith Dialogue

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

Movement gathers ten organizations of four different kinds, united only by the label movement and by working outside the settled structure of any single established religious body.

Three are congresses built for dialogue among traditions rather than doctrine held by any one. The World's Parliament of Religions first convened in Chicago in 1893, bringing Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Zoroastrianism onto one platform for the first time at that scale, and was reconstituted at its 1993 centenary as the continuing Parliament of the World's Religions. The World Congress of Faiths, founded in 1936 by the explorer and mystic Francis Younghusband, is among the oldest continuously active interfaith bodies. The United Religions Initiative, chartered in Pittsburgh in 2000 following a vision of the Episcopal bishop William Swing, works through more than eleven hundred local Cooperation Circles rather than any central authority.

Four are reform movements that remade practice inside a single tradition. The Brahmo Samaj, founded at Calcutta in 1828 by Ram Mohan Roy, rejected image worship and caste in favour of a Upanishad derived monotheism. The Singh Sabha, launched at Amritsar in 1873, worked to establish Sikhism as a religion distinct from Hinduism, and its own successor, the Gurdwara Reform Movement of 1920 to 1925, fought to move control of Punjab's gurdwaras from hereditary keepers to an elected body. Devotio Moderna, beginning with Geert Groote's preaching at Deventer in the 1370s, produced the Brethren of the Common Life and The Imitation of Christ.

The Theosophical Society split in 1895 into rival Adyar and Pasadena bodies, and the Arica Institute, founded in 1971, is an independent esoteric synthesis built around the Enneagram.

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1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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