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The term "cult" first appeared in English in 1617, derived from the French culte, meaning "worship" which in turn originated from the Latin word cultus meaning "care, cultivation, worship". The meaning "devotion to a person or thing" is from 1829. Starting about 1920, "cult" acquired an additional six or more positive and negative definitions.
In their typology, a "cult movement" is an actual complete organization, differing from a "sect" in that it is not a splinter of a bigger religion, while "audience cults" are loosely organized, and propagated through media, and "client cults" offer services (i.e. psychic readings or meditation sessions).
Montell argues in Cultish that cults and cultists can be identified in particular through their non-standard use of language – as scholar Scott Lowe put it, "the technical terms, the redefined words, the shorthand, the clichés, the euphemisms, logical distortions, and so on […] set members apart from (and above) their pedestrian neighbors, families, and coworkers". [2]
The academic study of new religious movements has been noted to be unusually hostile, with scholars holding strong opinions as to the influence of cults on society. [1] [2] A 1998 article in the magazine Lingua Franca reported on the acrimony of the scholarly debate on the topic; in the "cult-anticult debate", [3] scholars have been described as exhibiting a "toxic level" of suspicion toward ...
Various sociological classifications of religious movements have been proposed by scholars. In the sociology of religion, the most widely used classification is the church-sect typology. The typology is differently construed by different sociologists, and various distinctive features have been proposed to characterise churches and sects.
In literature, writing style is the manner of expressing thought in language characteristic of an individual, period, school, or nation. [1] As Bryan Ray notes, however, style is a broader concern, one that can describe "readers' relationships with, texts, the grammatical choices writers make, the importance of adhering to norms in certain contexts and deviating from them in others, the ...
While the word religion is difficult to define, one standard model of religion used in religious studies courses defines it as [a] system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations ...
An English writing style is a combination of features in an English language composition that has become characteristic of a particular writer, a genre, a particular organization, or a profession more broadly (e.g., legal writing).