"Faith and Moral Development in Fundamentalist Religious Communities: Lessons Learned from Five New Religious Movements" is, first, a work of practical theology. The practical theology employed in this study understands religious communities as carriers of practical reason, asking of each of them the normative and descriptive questions: Are these communities representing the ideals and norms of their respective traditions as carriers of religious knowledge? In what ways are these communities implementers of practical religious wisdom and what is it that this wisdom teaches? With Browning (1991), my conviction is that religious communities can and do constitute embodiments of practical theology and these respective theologies participate in practical wisdom through their religious symbols, histories, narratives, and rituals.

Second, this study represents an effort to take seriously subcultures of fundamentalist New Religious Movements (fNRMs). It is a response to prevailing theories of moral and faith development as suggested by the cognitive structuralist tradition. Suspecting that cognitive structuralist based assessments, and thus, their theories, render fNRM adherents' faith and moral development in overly simplistic terms, this study proposes a qualitative method to analyze the sociological, historical, theological, and anthropological factors involved in the religious worlds created within fNRMs. This method, alongside traditional developmental assessments, elevates, for full view, the complexities of faith and moral development in fundamentalist communities. The studies of these five fNRMs moved in different directions, but systematically revealed different but complex factors, sophisticated styles and modes of integration in patterns of reasoning involved in the daily negotiations of living in faith communities, thinking through the contents of faith, and maintaining faith-based commitments. The results of this study point toward poststructuralism, with its theories of multiple subjectivities, to account for the complex patterns of reasoning required to negotiate multiple subjectivities in an increasingly demanding world. Perhaps a poststructuralist theory of both moral and faith development are needed to more accurately describe both of these processes as we now understand them in the context of postmodernity. Poststructuralism suggests that, rather than stages of faith and moral development, individuals adopt constellations of patterns of reasoning that are locally and communally driven.