A reoccurring interest of mine throughout this class has been McGuire’s religious typology and how it fits into other aspects of the course. Every time I read a “religion in the news” article, or while I read my case study book (Ammerman) I’d think to myself “where would this fall in McGuire’s typology diagram? While working on my case study presentation, I noticed Ammerman made a distinction that stood out to me between Deer Valley Church and Center Street Church. Though both groups referred to themselves as evangelical, Deer Valley Church was described as “nondenominational”, and looking back on the PowerPoint from class, Evangelicals fell under the “denominational’ category. This made me realize that religious typology is quite an important thing to talk about. Diversity within a religion seems to lead to diversity of the people who partake, different ways of practice calls for different kinds of people, this seems somewhat intuitive. But when one looks at it the other way, does the lack of “diversity” of practice of belief correlate with the lack of diversity of members in the church? Personally, I think it does, though my knowledge of scholarly research on the subject is small, so it’s only an opinion at this point. Branching from that thought, more questions pop up having to do with cults specifically. My initial perception of the typology dynamic was that the “tension with society” category has a pretty strong tie with the “one way” of thinking/practicing category. My question is essentially, “why is it that cults fall under the ‘tension with society’ category if they provide ‘many ways’ of thinking? Why is there tension if there’s no definitive right and wrong way of doing things?”