Selected AFF Achievements: 1995/96

AFF has recently released four important publications: (1) the American Bar Association report, Cults in American Society: A Legal Analysis of undue Influence, Fraud and Misrepresentation; (2) The Boston Movement: Critical Perspectives on the International Churches of Christ (edited by Carol Giambalvo and Herbert Rosedale); (3) a second, revised edition of Carol Giambalvo's Exit Counseling: A Family Intervention; (4) a revised edition of Marcia Rudin's Cults on Campus.

As part of Project Outreach, AFF launched the bimonthly newsletter, AFF News. Edited by Patrick Ryan, this newsletter seeks to introduce AFF  resources to former cult members and others who have never contacted AFF.

AFF director Dr. Edward Lottick prepared a cover-page article about cults published in the July 1995 issue of Pennsylvania Medicine. Included in the issue was a special insert for physicians and an insert for physicians to   give to their patients.

AFF's Executive Director, Dr. Michael Langone, who was named the 1995 Albert V. Danielsen Visiting Scholar at Boston University, completed a  report on a research study in which he compared former members of the Boston Movement, Roman Catholicism, and a mainstream campus ministry on two dimensions: (1) ratings of their former group's psychological abusiveness, and (2) psychological distress. Former Boston Movement subjects scored significantly higher on both dimensions. A summary report of this study will soon be published in the Cult Observer.

In June 1995, AFF president, Herbert L. Rosedale, Esq., delivered a commencement address to the graduating class of the State University of New York's Institute of Technology at Utica/Rome, "Promises and Illusions" (printed in Cultic Studies Journal, Volume 11, Number 2).

In October 1995, AFF conducted a joint conference with Denver Seminary; "Recovery From Cults: A Pastoral/ Psychological Dialogue," which brought  together secular and religious professionals concerned about cultic abuses. Edited transcripts and prepared papers from this conference will be published in a future Cultic Studies Journal.

Professional talks in 1995 &'96 were given to a number of organizations, including:

New York City's New School for Social Research

Amherst College

Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

The American Psychological Association

The U.S. Congress on Psychiatry and Mental Health

Rutgers University

University of Massachusetts

Association of Entrepreneurial Education

Did you know?

Cults are a worldwide problem. European concerns about cults led to the European Parliament's passing a Resolution on Cults in 1984 (reprinted in AFF's Cultic Studies Journal), to three international conferences on cults, and to a report by the Council of Europe (reprinted in Cultic Studies Journal). The French government has twice studied the cult problem and issued book-length reports on the problem in France. Similar reports have been issued in Germany. Even in Latin America, cults have generated considerable concern. Cultic Studies Journal has published two articles on the cult problem in Latin America.

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