I was leafing through a book entitled Further Along the Road Less Travelled by M Scott Peck the other day. This author, for those not acquainted with him, wrote a bestseller in the 1980s called The Road Less Travelled, about the wisdom he had gained from his own clinical experiences as a psychiatrist, then a psychotherapist and “healer”. I put the word “healer” in quote marks, not because Peck might not have brought some solace and insight into the lives of some troubled people, but because, like the word “charismatic”, it is thrown about too easily in these troubled times when many people are searching for healing (or so it seems), not aware of where the source of all true healing is to be found: in Christ. Quite a lot of this sequel is really pop psychology – not exactly bad, but very simplistic. Yet almost any book can yield something of interest. I found it at the end of Peck’s book where he lists the 10 characteristics in his view of what makes a cult: