Origins
ICSA began in 1979 as the American Family Foundation (AFF). It was founded by Kay Barney, the retired Raytheon International Affairs Director, whose daughter had become involved with the Unification Church. Barney wished to address the field professionally and scientifically and so founded AFF as a non-profit tax-exempt organisation for research and education. It was directed by a Board of directors of which Barney was part.
Initially, nearly everybody who contacted AFF for help did so because he/she had a child involved in a group the parent was concerned about. AFF's role was to bring these parents into contact with helping professionals, increasing numbers of whom became interested in and/or involved with AFF as time passed.
The AFF received funding from the Bodman and Achelis Foundations and the Scaife Family Foundation of Richard Mellon Scaife. The Scaife Family Foundation has given over a half million dollars to the AFF.
In 1980/81 AFF joined forces with John Gordon Clark, a Harvard psychiatrist who had undertaken research in the field of New Religious Movements, and his team, to which Michael Langone belonged.
In 2004, the organization took the name International Cultic Studies Association, "to better reflect the organization's focus and increasingly international and scholarly dimensions".
Read more about this topic: International Cultic Studies Association
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)