New Religious Movements: A Practical Introduction

Eileen Barker is a sociologist of religion at the London School of Economics and a leading academic authority on new religious movements, and this HMSO volume is her scholarly introduction to the field, written for a general but informed readership. Its strength is that Barker's own research is built on direct fieldwork with movements including the Unification Church, giving the overview a grounding in primary contact with the groups it discusses rather than secondhand description alone. Its limit is that it is a general introduction to the category of new religious movements as such, so a claim about the specific internal doctrine of one particular movement, Christian Science or Scientology for instance, needs a source focused on that movement rather than this survey.