Introduction / Absolutes and relatives: two problems for new religious movements / Cults, culture and manure: why the root of the second should be the first rather than the third / Religion and the Internet: the global marketplace / Religious groups and globalisation: a comparative perspective / Religion after atheism: moving away from the communal flat / Notes on the contemporary peril to religious freedom / Chapter in the life of Eileen Barker: the American Psychological Association, brainwashing controviersies and the Great Cult Apoligist Conspiracy / Satanic abuse: lessons from a controversy / Countercult monitoring movement in historical perspective / Making of a moral panic: religion and state in Singapore / PART III. RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND EMPOWERMENT -- What's happening in American church/state jurisprudence? / Religious toleration in Western and Central European countries / Religious minorites in France: a Protestant perspective / Gendered spiritualities / Making of a survivor: rhetoric and reality in the study of religion and abuse / Aspects of the constitution, construction and reconstruction of human reality / Sociology of wisdom / Cataclysms and the apocalyptic imagination