How Prophecy Lives

Sociologists, a psychologist, a political scientist, and a religion scholar begin with When Prophecy Fails a 1956 book by Leon Festinger and two of his graduate students about a flying-saucer group whose leader's prophetic pronouncements had failed to be fulfilled. The book only gained widespread attention decades later when scholarly interest rose in new religious movements. The 50th anniversary of that publication was marked with a special session at the September 2006 convention of the Religious Research Association, but untimely losses and other slings and arrows have delayed publication of the eight papers until now. Among the topics are moving beyond Festinger to a new paradigm for studying failed prophecy, Chen Tao as a case of failed prophecy and group demise, and thoughts on the study of the Unarious Prophecy. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Diana G. Tumminia received her Ph.D. in social psychology from UCLA. She is author of When Prophecy Never Fails (Oxford 2005) an intensive ethnographic study of the Uranius Academy of Science, and Alien Worlds: Social and Religious Dimensions of Extraterrestrial Contact (Syracuse 2007). She is Emerita Professor of Sociology at the University of California Long Beach.William H. Swatos, Jr. is Executive Officer of the Association for the Sociology of Religion and of the Religious Research Association. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky and is currently a Senior Fellow at the Center for Religious Inquiry Across the Disciplines at Baylor University and teaching at Augustana College (Illinois).