Hugh Urban tells the real story of Scientology from its cold war-era beginnings in the 1950s to its prominence today as the religion of Hollywood’s celebrity elite. Urban paints a vivid portrait of Hubbard, the enigmatic founder who once commanded his own private fleet and an intelligence apparatus rivaling that of the U.S. government. One FBI agent described him as “a mental case,” but to his followers he is the man who “solved the riddle of the human mind.” Urban details Scientology’s decades-long war with the IRS, which ended with the church winning tax-exempt status as a religion; the rancorous cult wars of the 1970s and 1980s; as well as the latest challenges confronting Scientology, from attacks by the Internet group Anonymous to the church’s efforts to suppress the online dissemination of its esoteric teachings.
The Church of Scientology demonstrates how Scientology has reflected the broader anxieties and obsessions of postwar America, and raises profound questions about how religion is defined and who gets to define it.
The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion is a 2011 book about the history of the Church of Scientology by Hugh Urban, a professor of religious studies in the Department of Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. Urban discusses the history and teachings of the group and how they relate to broader trends in American society. Urban also writes about whether the group is a religion, and how religion is defined. In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Seth Perry states that Urban "is more concerned with the questions Scientology raises than about Scientology itself".
Hugh Bayard Urban is a professor of religious studies at Ohio State University's Department of Comparative Studies and author of eight books and several academic articles, including a history of the Church of Scientology, published by Princeton University Press in 2012. He received his PhD in history of religions from the University of Chicago.
. . .Urban's academic focus began with the religions of India and expanded to his studies of new religious movements in both the United States and Europe, about which he has written many academic books and articles. He has said that the knowledge and power used by religions to keep information hidden from others had always fascinated him.
Video Title: Dr. Hugh Urban, Scholarly Look At What Many Call Cults |437|. Source: skeptiko. Date Published: January 14, 2020. Description:
Dr. Hugh Urban brings scholarly rigor to the study of Scientology and Osho, but what about consciousness?
