Many sociological theories on new religious movements (sects or cults) point out that they create new types of community in response to contemporary social and cultural changes that have had deleterious effects both on the family and on communal relationships. This paper examines three contemporary groups in the United States as religious communities. ISKCON, a Hindu sect, has become a well-structured parish-type community whose members are engaged in different levels of involvement. It maintains its identity not only by its unique religious practices and lifestyle, but also by regional and international meetings. The Aetherius Society, a UFO religion, teaches occult wisdom and encourages its members to participate in many missions whose goals are to further the good of the earth and its inhabitants. Finally, Promise Keepers, the most recent Christian evangelical revival, while allowing its members to keep their denom-national ties, bonds them together by a strong, conservative theology and by means of small group meetings, and local and national rallies. These groups dif Jer in their ideologies, in their religious goals, in their relations to society at large, and in the type of communal relationships they have established. However, they are all characterized by a homogeneity in ideology and religious practice, and by an opposition to the secular ideology that pervades Western culture.
This paper discusses prevailing representations in social science studies on the successor states of the Soviet Union, as well as on the ethnic fringe of the Russian Federation. Whereas the critique of Orientalism has led, over the past twenty years, to a more historical and nuanced approach to understanding Islamic societies, post-Soviet Studies tend to uncritically incorporate and apply Orientalist, static and over-deterministic portrayals of Islam. In reviewing the basic critiques of Orientalism, particular attention is paid to how ‘regions and their boundaries are constructed through scholarship. Comparing scholarly and popular notions of ‘the Orient’, ‘the Balkans’, ‘Central Asia’ and ‘the Islamic world’, highlights the similarities and differences of these ‘imaginative geographis’ and the ways in which they shape perceptions of the societies and peoples of these regions. Nationalism, ethnic identification and Islamic beliefs are all offered as major factors embroiling these regions in political and armed conflict, and preventing them from integrating into the global economy and polity. This paper argues that the focus on Islam, as both the cause and the explanation of conflict in these regions, is as much a result of the disorder in post-Soviet Studies as of real political struggles taking place. The implications of conceptually assimilating these regions into the ‘Islamic World Order’ need to be carefully considered.