Revivalist movements and religious contracultures in Finland

Political Fields and Religious Movements: the Exclusion of the Ahmadiyya Community in Pakistan

This paper examines the Pakistani state’s shift from the accommodation to exclusion of the heterodox Ahmadiyya community, a self-defined minority sect of Islam. In 1953, the Pakistani state rejected demands by a religious movement that Ahmadis be legally declared non-Muslim. In 1974 however, the same demand was accepted. This paper argues that this shift in the state’s policy toward Ahmadis was...

Destructiveness as a Disfunction of Religious Identity: A Comment on the Methodology of Research into New Religious Movements

In the article, the problem of new religious movements (NRM) is regarded as a a specific form of modern religiosity, shaped under the influence of the deconstruction of traditional religious normative conventions. The special attention is paid to the identification processes, influenced by NRMs, particularly to such controversial aspects as its destructive potential for the human personality. A...

Religious affiliation and all-cause mortality: a prospective population study in middle-aged men in eastern Finland.

BACKGROUND Previous data suggest a favourable association between religion and mortality. METHODS We investigated the association between selected religious groups and all-cause mortality in 1627 eastern Finnish men aged 42-60 years during 1984-1989 as a part of the Kuopio Ischaemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study (KIHD). RESULTS Eastern Orthodox men had a 5.1-fold (95% confidence interval ...

Constructing “the Other”:ethno-religious Identity in Separatist Movements in Southeast Asia

"the World Is Upside Down": Women's Participation in Religious Movements in Mozambique

In recent years, new Pentecostal-style churches have proliferated around the world. Expanding at astonishing rates in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, the growth of Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches has shifted the global center of gravity of Christianity from the West to the global South. This dissertation takes a new approach to studying the impacts of such powerful new religious developments....