Religious cults have marked every society since the beginning of time. Some have an audacious presence, like Anton Szandor LaVey's Church of the Process, whose black-caped missionaries used to walk streets of Philadelphia. Other cults seem to be the very soul of respectability, like Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, a name that does justice to the group's well intentioned beginnings and the good the Peace Mission went on to accomplish, but which nevertheless hides a history of skullduggery and intrigue. Father Divine, ...
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Religious cults have marked every society since the beginning of time. Some have an audacious presence, like Anton Szandor LaVey's Church of the Process, whose black-caped missionaries used to walk streets of Philadelphia. Other cults seem to be the very soul of respectability, like Father Divine's Peace Mission Movement, a name that does justice to the group's well intentioned beginnings and the good the Peace Mission went on to accomplish, but which nevertheless hides a history of skullduggery and intrigue. Father Divine, to his believers, was God, placing him in an already overcrowded cosmos inhabited by pop-up gurus, false shamans, embodiment of divinity leaders, and assorted New Age marketers like Philadelphia's own Swami Nostradamus Virato, publisher of New Frontier Magazine , once the toast of the city's New Age community. Some cults, like Scientology, began as a fringe movement that mushroomed into Hollywood-centric empires, while other cults, like Madame Blavatsky and her 19th Century Theosophical Society, swept the world before ending up as a small lecture society just off Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square. In the post-modern era, the death of religion has transformed political and social causes into doctrinaire factions that might as well be religious cults that advocate the most severe forms of orthodoxy.
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Add this copy of From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults to cart. $49.22, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2020 by America Through Time.