Lukas Pokorny, Ph.D. (2008), is Professor and Chair in Religious Studies at the Department of Religious Studies, University of Vienna. He has published on new religious movements, millenarianism, and Confucianism. His present research focuses, among others, on ethnocentrism and millenarian beliefs in East Asian new religious movements.

Franz Winter, Ph.D. (1999 and 2005) and Habilitation (2010), is teaching Religious Studies at the University of Graz. His areas of research comprise, among others, the history of religious contact between Asia and Europe from Antiquity to the present and new religious movements.

Contributors are: Erica Baffelli, Donald L. Baker, Paul Beirne, Sergei Blagov, Pascal Bourdeaux, Bongkil Chung, Philip Clart, Ugo Dessì, Emily Dunn, Anne Mette Fisker-Nielsen, Esther-Maria Guggenmos, Marcus Günzel, Edward Irons, Jérémy Jammes, John Jorgensen, Hui-yeon Kim, Hideaki Matsuoka, Benjamin Penny, Victoria Rose Montrose, Barbara Rossetti Ambros, Monika Schrimpf, Timothy Smith, Birgit Staemmler, Nancy K. Stalker, Gregory Wilkinson, Yu-shuang Yao, Carl F. Young