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This chapter compares the Order of Christ Sophia (OCS) and mainstream denominations via the Parish Profile Inventory developed by the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. Though it is clear that the order is different, there are also many similarities with more mainstream religions. This comparison begins to hint at the challenges such movements face as they mature and attempt to establish lasting church-like organizational forms within a U.S. religious context, in which considerable changes are taking place and are having an effect on all types of religious organizations. The chapter suggests that these changes are beginning to make what has been described as a new religion look much more like a highly successful niche congregation, perhaps greater in religious intensity than most but similar in organization and group dynamics to many other Christian congregations.

This chapter shows that lollard writings about prayer attach distinctive meanings to prayer as an activity and to the words that should be prayed, even as they draw very extensively on the common ground they share with the mainstream tradition. The chapter notes, however, that how widely the lollard writings on prayer selected for discussion were read, and by whom, and how they influenced the religious practice of ordinary people, some of whom may also have been investigated for heresy, remains uncertain. It emphasizes that the relationship between writings about prayer and the meanings ordinary people attached to prayer are not completely unrecoverable and deserve further investigation.

This chapter addresses controversies in Transcendental Meditation (TM) and its history in the West (and especially in North America); chronicling periods of less or more mainstreaming on the TM part—moving from world peace and psychedelics in the Beatles era to science as a way of attracting the “Average Joanna” practitioner in later years. The chapter also provides a short overview of the Art of Living Foundation (AoL), a splinter group from TM and a rather recent addition to the Indian-oriented new religious movement (INRM) “family tree”. It explores the likelihood of schisms within AoL and assesses interactions between AoL, TM, and the mass media.

The Opsahl Commission was an independent enquiry into ways forward in Northern Ireland, which produced its report in June 1993. The Commission sought to involve the people of Northern Ireland in the debate about its future. The exercise highlighted a continuing gulf of understanding between Protestant and Catholic. There is still a sense that the other community is a different people and ignorance is preventing any overall sense of a shared culture. Northern Ireland is not a zone of conflicting polarities, as many believe. There are too many shades of grey, too many people who ‘pick and mix’ from a range of identities, for that. But there are certain fundamentals to the mainstream religions which their adherents rarely lose even when they cease to be practising members. This chapter analyzes these core differences.