Editorial: "Sects, Rituals, and Property Problems" Dr. Fenggang Yang, Editor-in-Chief

Is Chinese religion so unique that the terms and theories used in the study of religion in the West are not applicable? How appropriate is it to construct new terms to describe Chinese religious phenomena in modern times? How useful are the terms adopted from Western scholarship? How useful are terms that are not used by the religious believers and practitioners themselves? Terms are conceptual tools. To deal with complex and changing religious phenomena, it is always necessary to sharpen our tools, invent new tools, or revamp old tools. In this issue, Nikolas Broy examines the conceptual tools of “sect, ” “sectarian religion, ” and “redemptive society. ” He argues that the concept of redemptive societies that has been recently constructed to describe the religious effervescence in early twentieth-century China has significant shortcomings. Instead, he suggests adopting a revised concept of sectarian religion grounded in a sociological framework. How new are the new sectarian religions in terms of their theology, rituals, organization, and so on? Continuity and discontinuity are perennial issues in examining new religious movements. Junliang Pan studies one of the new sects active in China today—the Churc