Disillusionment and Mourning in the FFWPU

Abstract

This paper will apply Peter Homans’s argument on mourning to the new religious movement phenomena of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification (FFWPU). Homans’s theory focused on the progressive and creative aspects of mourning and extended the discussion from the personal to the social, collective level of mourning. Sifting through the history of the FFWPU, I will show how the emergence, formation, and transformation of this new religious movement (NRM) arose as a creative response to absence, ranging from personal death to the loss of religious values and symbols.