Among the items in this issue of Religion News Briefs: Criticizing the Mormon Church can get you excommunicated. Leaving the destructive Scientology cult is scary (and wise).
Also: After three decades of debate on homosexuality, the Presbyterian Church has changed its definition of marriage. Plus: the Ex-Hijabi Fashion Photo Blog.
Find out much religious groups have shifted toward supporting LGBT rights since 2003.
Also: learn about a church where God doesn’t attend. Then there’s a guy who puts the fear of God into many atheists.
And for millions of people around the world, the end came a little closer last week.
Updated Israeli police have arrested man whom they suspect of leading a violent cult community that routinely practiced child abuse.
The group of people he controlled consisted of six families, including 11 parents and 25 children.
In today’s issue of Religion News Briefs: Already jailed for violating residential zoning codes, ‘home bible study’ pastor Michael Salman now faces a series of felony charges.
Plus: the condition of cult leader Sun Myung Moon worsens.
A daughter-in-law of Samuel Mullet, the leader of a breakaway Amish group on trial on hate crimes charges, says he coerced her into sex. Meanwhile his sister says Mullet’s group is a cult.
The Israeli government has distanced itself from a new Scientology cult center in Jaffa.
Also: the authors of a new study say the common assumption that natural and supernatural explanations are incompatible is psychologically inaccurate.
Plus, the latest issue of ICSA (International Cultic Studies Association) Today has an in-depth article about the history of the Wellspring Retreat and Resource Center — non-profit residential treatment facility that provides a program of counseling and instruction to victims of cultic abuse, religious abuse and/or mind control.
The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense subcommittee on Foreign Policy urged the Israeli government Tuesday to garner support from Evangelical Christians around the world, and to strengthen its connection to those outside of the US.
Tensions ran high in Beit Shemesh, Israel, Tuesday night as thousands of people gathered to protest against the rise of ultra- Orthodox extremism.
They spoke out against a growing frequency in attacks against a local religious-Zionist girls’ elementary school and the broader trend of haredi exclusion of women from the public domain.
A panel of academics and professionals from Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Services will meet Thursday to discuss the possibility of creating legislation to legally outlaw sects and cultish practices in Israel.
The one-day symposium will explore the ethical dilemma of curbing such groups and attempt to sharpen the definition of what constitutes a cult.
The historic Alhambra cinema building belongs to the international Scientology movement through trustee Gur Finkelstein, who is suspected of attempted murder.
The foreclosure followed a petition by N.N. Salati Engineering and Projects Management, which last week filed a NIS 7.6 million suit against Finkelstein and the Scientology movement.
The three central defendants in a Jerusalem cult were indicted in the Jerusalem District Court on Wednesday, in a case of what police and social workers have called the worst abuse of its kind they have seen in decades.
Israel Police, in cooperation with Jerusalem district officers and social services, arrested nine members of a cult living in Jerusalem and in the Tiberias area over the past few weeks, on suspicion of carrying out emotional and physical abuse of women and children over a two year period.
Police and social workers familiar with the case described severe physical, emotional, and sexual violence, that landed several of the children in the hospital, some multiple times.