World Religions and Spirituality Project
The World Religions and Spirituality Project (WRSP, formerly known as the New Religious Movements Homepage Project) publishes academic profiles of new and established religious movements, archive material related to some groups, and articles that provide context for the profiles. It is referenced by scholars, journalists, and human rights groups to provide a scholarly representation of threatened communities. History. WRSP developed from Jeffrey K. Hadden's Religious Movements Homepage Project, which he founded in 1995. After Hadden's death in 2003, Douglas E. Cowan became Project Director. In 2007, it was described as "one of the  largest information sites on new religious movements". In 2010, David G. Bromley became the Project Director. He expanded the scope of the project to recruit international scholars instead of local students and renamed it the World Religions and Spirituality Project. Purpose. In an article that discusses the challenge of teaching students about new religious movements, Douglas E. Cowan explains that, because of "the thousands of NRMs that exist in the world at any one time, only a relative handful are ever discussed in the various print resources [...], and the Internet is, by default, the only source of information available. The  issue then becomes how credible the information is that they obtain online." Websites like CESNUR, the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, the Internet Sacred Text Archive, the Association of Religion Data Archives, and WRSP are understood as examples of websites that respond to this problem. These websites serve to popularize the academic study of new religious movements. Special projects. In addition to publishing profiles, it has ten special projects, thematic or regional, which are directed by recognized scholars.