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.