This project is the result of a collaborative effort. We the coeditors are grateful to the contributors of this series for sharing their expertise with the general public through these outstanding scholarly essays. They did so for the sake of bringing to a wide reading audience the best information and interpretations now available about a wide range of new religious movements. We are especially grateful to Catherine Wessinger and David Bromley for helping us identify authors and for many other suggestions that have improved this set of volumes. We the coeditors thank all of these scholars who gave so much to make this set possible. Many of them wrote their essays amid personal hardship and busy professional lives. We also thank Suzanne Staszak-Silva, our editor at Greenwood, for her advice and guidance as this set went from one stage of development to another. We are also grateful to our colleagues, at our respective teaching institutions as well as among the wider scholarly community, who offered us personal support and encouragement, much free advice, and many good wishes and kind thoughts. Finally, we thank our families: our wives, Jennifer Gallagher and Carrol Davenport, and our daughters, Maggie Gallagher and Brittany and Kathleen Ashcraft. We lovingly dedicate this set to those daughters, our hope for the future, whom we love very much.

When you author a book and you get to the process of writing any acknowledgments it is a very good day. It means you are finally at the end of a very long journey that has many ups and downs. From late nights working through coding issues, to scouring the web for any new information on the topics you are trying to write about, getting here requires a lot of help. First and foremost, I want to thank Maureen Spears for once again leading me through this journey and keeping me sane when deadlines were missed or things just didn’t work the way I wanted them to. I also need to thank Mary James for keeping all of us on track and taking care of the various project management details of which there were many, given the number of authors involved. Finally, I want to thank Paul Reese who initiated this entire process quite some time ago and got the entire ball rolling!