This book tells the story of the children and youth of the charismatic new religious commune Knutby Filadelfia in Sweden. It recounts the history of the congregation, which started out as a part of the Swedish Pentecostalmovement in 1921. In the 1990s, it developed into a new religion, when the congregation’s female pastor embraced the role of the Bride of Christ. The congregation became widely known in 2004 when one of its members was murdered by another member, the latter claiming to have been acting on orders from God. In 2018, the congregation dissolved after a few years of internal crisis. Sanja Nilsson provides rich empirical analysis of archival material and interviews with the congregation’s children and youth. The young informants’ personal perspectives on their own childhoods encompass narratives from their time inside the congregation, when they identified as members of a stigmatizedminority religion, as well as from the time after the dissolution of the group, when they identified asdefectors from what they came to view as a sectarian milieu. This work offers a comprehensive insight into the Knutby Filadelfia congregation, a group, that although notoriously charted by the media, has been hitherto unexplored by academics. It adds to the growing field of studies concerned with childhoods within new religions and expounds the dynamics of the defection process from the rarely applied perspective of children and youth themselves.

Similarities between esoteric and mystical currents in different religious traditions have long interested scholars. This book takes a new look at the relationship between such currents. It advances a discussion that started with the search for religious essences, archetypes, and universals, from William James to Eranos. The universal categories that resulted from that search were later criticized as essentialist constructions, and questioned by deconstructionists. An alternative explanation was advanced by diffusionists: that there were transfers between different traditions. This book presents empirical case studies of such constructions, and of transfers between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the premodern period, and Judaism, Christianity, and Western esotericism in the modern period. It shows that there were indeed transfers that can be clearly documented, and that there were also indeed constructions, often very imaginative. It also shows that there were many cases that were neither transfers nor constructions, but a mixture of the two.

This is a book dealing with the fundamental question of ufology. Are UFOs real or not? This problem has been studied for decades, and it is still severely debated by ufologists and skeptics. Most academics are skeptics. What is the right answer? This book goes systematically and thoroughly through the essential arguments for and against UFOs and enlightens the scientific grounds of ufology.

Religious ideas, practices, discourses, institutions, and social expressions are in constant flux. This volume addresses the internal and external dynamics, interactions between individuals, religious communities, and local as well as global society. The contributions concentrate on four areas: 1. Contemporary religion in the public sphere: The Tactics of (In)visibility among Religious Communities in Europe; Religion Intersecting De-nationalization and Re-nationalization in Post-Apartheid South Africa; 2. Religious transformations: Forms of Religious Communities in Global Society; Political Contributions of Ancestral Cosmologies and the Decolonization of Religious Beliefs; Esoteric Tradition as Poetic Invention; 3. Focus on the individual: Religion and Life Trajectories of Islamists; Angels, Animals and Religious Change in Antiquity and Today; Gaining Access to the Radically Unfamiliar in Today’s Religion; Religion between Individuals and Collectives; 4. Narrating religion: Entangled Knowledge Cultures and the Creation of Religions in Mongolia and Europe; Global Intellectual History and the Dynamics of Religion; On Representing Judaism.

Winter is chilling. Summer is brutal. But every season is perfect for murder. When it comes to solving crimes so gruesome that they make the darkest of nightmares look like cosy fairy tales, Detective Inspector Malin Fors is the one you want assigned to the case. But he brilliant but flawed star of the Linköping police force, is on the verge. She is on the verge of being addicted to Tequila, of becoming a workaholic, and she is always liable to lether strong emotions and repressed memories dictate her life. 'One of the best realised female heroines I've read.' Guardian

Meet police superintendent Malin Fors: Talented. Troubled. With a sixth sense for the truth. Join her on a manhunt that takes her to the darkest corners of the human heart in this chilling first novel from Scandinavian crime writer Mons Kallentoft. WHEN THE ICE MELTS, WHAT REMAINS? Thirty-four years old, blond, single, divorced with a teenage daughter, Fors is the most driven superintendent who has ever worked on the police force in her small, isolated town. And the most talented. In her job, she is constantly moving through the borderland between life and death. Her path in life is violent and hazardous. Linköping, Sweden, is surrounded by a landscape of plains and forests—a fault line on the edges of society where time seems to have stood still and where some people live entirely according to their own rules. In the early hours of a frigid night, during the coldest February anyone can remember, the bloody body of an obese man, stripped bare and horribly mutilated, is found hanging from a lone oak tree in the middle of a frozen, snow-covered, and windswept plain not far from town. The young superintendent Malin Fors is assigned to the case. Together with her colleagues from the Investigation Section of Linköping’s Crime Unit, she must track down the identity of the man in the tree and the reason why he ended up there. And at the same time they must follow in the frigid wake of a killer who has just begun his work. It is a manhunt that will take Malin into the darkest corners of the human heart where the sins of the past—hidden away—all too often wreak havoc from one generation to the next.

Something terrifying is happening all over Oslo: celebrities are turning up dead in the most macabre of situations. A talk show host is found with her tongue cut out, a politician crucified with a copy of the Koran stuffed inside of her, a literary critic stabbed in the eye. It's clear that the killer is sending some sort of message-but what is he trying to say? Police Commissioner Adam Stubo and his wife, profiler Johanne Vik, both exhausted by the arrival of their new baby, are reluctant to join the investigation until it becomes totally necessary. As Stubo leads the inquiry, Johanne stays at home with the child, finding herself haunted by a pattern she remembers from her FBI stint years before, a time she's tried hard to put out of her mind. But as time seems to be running out, she must confront the demons of her past in order to stop the killer from completing this twisted series of murders.