In this video an elder states that disfellowshipping is a congregational matter and not a family matter and that Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t use the word ‘shunning’.
He talks positively about disfellowshipping saying that “for every six or ten people you bring on here that have bad experiences [with disfellowshipping] I can bring a hundred people that have been disfellowshipped … who will say it is the best thing that happened in their life”. Watch the video! Read more…
A man filmed the announcement of his Disfellowshipment made by two Jehovah’s Witness elders who came at his door. Watch the video! Read more…
The Bronx, New York -Julio Lopez, a Jehovah’s Witness man gunned down his estranged wife and then killed himself after accusing her of straying from their faith and sleeping with another man, police and neighbors said yesterday. Read more…
Andrew Holden
Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, UK
ABSTRACT
Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a puritanical religious movement that claims to be in but not of the world. The Witnesses are zealous proselytisers who have expanded rapidly over the past 130 years and there are now more than 6 million devotees worldwide. 
This paper examines the socialisation of second and subsequent generation members and describes how the movement deals with those who refuse to comply with its regime. Extracts are presented from interviews with young members who recall their childhood memories of growing up in the movement and explain what happened when they rebelled against its quasi-totalitarian doctrines. The main argument advanced in the paper is that parents who socialise their children in accordance with this particular creed are protecting them from a modern world of relativism and uncertainty. Read more…
Andrew Holden
Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, UK
ABSTRACT
Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a puritanical religious movement that claims to be in but not of the world. The movement has expanded rapidly over the past 130 years and there are now more than 6 million devotees worldwide.
This paper examines the ways in which the movement promotes its millenarian message to prospective recruits. It also considers how the Witnesses are able to hold futuristic beliefs and at the same time, lead active lives in the present. The methods of data collection include unstructured interviews with devotees and content analysis of the movement’s own literature. The paper concludes that while the Witnesses’ futuristic symbolism is a form of escape from the modern world, it is also part of their own pseudo-corporate ‘branding’ which has contributed to their international success. Read more…
Andrew Holden
Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, UK
ABSTRACT
Jehovah’s Witnesses are members of a puritanical religious movement that claims to be in but not of the world. The movement has expanded rapidly over the past 130 years and there are now more than 6 million devotees worldwide.
This paper examines the ways in which the movement has managed to retain a millenarian orientation in a world that is, for the most part, indifferent to its beliefs. The Witnesses reject many commonly recognised accoutrements of sacred practise such as mystical concepts, awesome rituals and transcendental symbolism in favour of a rationalised form of religion based on the study of published texts. Ethnographic analysis reveals the dependency of this quasi-totalitarian movement on the very physical and cultural resources it condemns. The paper concludes that the Witnesses’ anti-mystical faith is both an inverted form of corporate ‘branding’ and an anti-modern quest for certainty in a hostile world of relativism. The movement’s relationship with the modern world is, therefore, ambivalent and paradoxical. Read more…
A disfellowshipped armed man threatened to blow himself up in a Circuit Assembly Hall in Rome Saturday where around 2,000 members of the Jehovah’s Witnesses were holding a Circuit Meeting, Italian media said. Read more…
She wants to help former Jehovah’s Witnesses.
By Walt Wiley — Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 a.m. PST Friday, January 17, 2003
Blaming church policy for the deaths of her sister’s family, Sharon Roe plans to make a career of speaking out and helping former members deal with breaking from the Jehovah’s Witnesses church. Read more…
It happened last Thursday, the last day of the school year. Two boys squared off on the school playground. There are conflicting versions of who started the fight. But no doubt about who got the worst of it.
Eleven-year-old Augustin Maures lifts a protective veil to show us the more than 100 stitches doctors needed to close two slash wounds to his face. Read more…
Robert Bryant is believed to have shot his wife and four children before turning the gun on himself. Bryants and their relatives were Jehovah’s Witnesses. The family was reportedly shunned by both other Witnesses as well as their own relatives after an argument with an elder over the Bible. Read more…