Religious Movements

AUM SHINRIKYO (AUM OR ABSOLUTE OR SUPREME TRUTH MOVEMENT) (Religious Movement)

A new religion founded by Asahara Shoko (1955-) in the 1980s, this movement has become widely known for carrying out indiscriminate acts of violence using poisonous sarin gas and in particular for its attack on the Tokyo underground in March 1995. The leaders have since been arrested and many of them sentenced to death. Asahara, […]

ATHLETES FOR CHRIST (Religious Movement)

In 1974, after having read Apostle Paul (the Holy Bible, the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians, 9:24), the former Brazilian F1 pilot, Alex Dias Ribeiro, member of the Baptist Church, started to spread the word of God in motor racing competitions. His personal logo was the inscription JESUS SAVES which he displayed on […]

ASSEMBLIES OF GOD (Religious Movement)

Founders: E.N.Bell and J.Roswell Flowers The Assemblies of God churches date their origins back to the Azusa Street, Los Angeles, Pentecostal awakening in 1906 (see Azusa Street Revival), although they did not formally come together to form an integrated movement until their first General Council in Hot Springs Arkansas in 1914. This Council was assembled […]

ASSAGIOLI, ROBERTO (1888-1976) (Religious Movement)

This Italian psychiatrist developed a system of psychotherapy known as Psychosynthesis which claims to be a more complete system than that developed by his teacher Freud, who failed to acknowledge the reality of the Higher Self (see Self-Religion, The Self and self) and focused almost exclusively on three dimensions of the human psyche, the id, […]

ASAHARA SHOKO (NE MATSUMOTO, CHIZUO) (Religious Movement)

Asahara Shoku, founder of Aum Shinrikyo was born in 1955 in Kumamoto, Kyushu prefecture, to a poor family that made straw mats for a living. Poor sighted, he spent his primary and secondary school days in a boarding school for the blind. After finishing secondary education, he became a qualified masseur and went to Tokyo […]

BERG, DAVID BRANDT (Religious Movement)

David Brandt Berg (1919-94) was the founder and leader of The Children of God, later known as The Family (see Family, The). Raised in an Evangelical Christian environment (see Evangelical Christianity), Berg joined in missionary work from his early youth. After a brief period in the army, he served as a pastor in a mainstream […]

BAMBA MBACKE, AHMADU (Religious Movement)

Ahmadu Bamba Mbacke (1850/1-1927) a Muslim cleric of north-western Senegal, was the founder of the Murid Movement, a Sufi order but also a powerful political and economic organization. He built his following on the basis of his scholarship, also on the basis of miraculous feats in the face of the new French colonial authority in […]

BAHA'I (Religious Movement)

The Baha’i religion emerged from Shi’i Islam in the middle of the nineteenth century. It has developed into one of the more successful new religions, today claiming more than five million adherents. Its major goal is to create religious and political unity in the world and thereby promote a new and peaceful world civilization. The […]

BABA RAM DAS (a.k.a. Richard Alpert) (b. 1931) (Religious Movement)

Originally trained as a psychologist, Alpert was dismissed from his teaching position at Harvard University in 1963, as a consequence of experiments with LSD, together with his collaborator Timothy Leary. Alpert moved with Leary to the Ananda Ashram, in Millbrook, York, where he helped to found the League for Spiritual Discovery, which advocated the use […]

BLACK THEOLOGY (Religious Movement)

Modern Black Theology was born in the socio-political context of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s in America. During this period a number of Black theologians and religious protagonists became highly critical of racism in American society, Christianity and white theology. Some Black theologians were sympathetic to the ‘Black Power’ Movement for freedom and […]

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