Controversial New Religions
You might want to read Veena's article where she meets Mimi Goldman at her home in Somerset, April 2008.
Controversial New Religions
The book is edited by two American professors, James R. Lewis and Jesper Aagaard Peterson but the chapter on Osho, entitled: ‘When Leaders Dissolve: Considering Controversy and Stagnation in the Osho Rajneesh Movement’, is written by Marion S. Goldman, a professor at the University of Oregon.
I was impressed by the depth of detailed knowledge and the relatively unbiased understanding shown by Ms Goldman, so I searched for details of her on Google. I discovered that she is a professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon which is situated in Eugene, Oregon, about 3 hours drive from Rajneeshpuram and has in fact herself written a book called ‘Passionate Journeys’ about successful professional women who chose to take sannyas and live in Rajneeshpuram. It is possible, therefore, that she knew Roshani Shay who was a professor in Sociology at the same university which would explain the kind of ‘insider’ knowledge she reveals in this chapter. Roshani came to visit Rajneeshpuram because she was interested in this strange social phenomenon which had arisen virtually on her ‘doorstep’ and then fell in love with Osho and became a sannyasin. She was very important at the time for Osho and Rajneeeshpuram as she was an articulate respected academic with considerable ‘clout’ who spoke up very loudly for us to the media and government officials with whom we often had a pretty hard time.
Amazon writes this about the book:
This book complements Lewis’s ‘Oxford Handbook of New Religious Movements’. The former provides an overview of the state of the field. This volume collects papers on those specific New Religious Movements (NRMs) that have generated the most scholarly attention. With few exceptions, these organizations are also the controversial groups that have attracted the attention of the mass media, often because they have been involved in, or accused of, violent or anti-social activities.
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from Oxford University Press or with Amazon UK
text by Veena – November 2007
You might want to read Veena's article where she meets Mimi Goldman at her home in Somerset, April 2008.