conferences, French sociologist Jean Séguy wrote in 1988 that most participants were Catholic and presented the traditional Catholic view of phenomena such as Spiritualism and the New Age. Other members of CESNUR's board include Luigi Berzano, Gianni Ambrosio, Reender Kranenborg, Eileen Barker and J. Gordon Melton. Berzano, who later became CESNUR's president, is a professor of sociology at the University of Turin. Ambrosio is an Italian sociologist who became in 2007 bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Piacenza-Bobbio. Kranenborg is a Dutch Reformed theologian. Barker is a sociologist who wrote The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? (1984) and formed the Information Network Focus on Religious Movements (INFORM) in 1988. Melton is Distinguished Professor of American Religious History at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. In 1995 the French Parliamentary Commission on Cults in France, after the events of the Order of the Solar Temple, published a critical report on cults. This was followed by similar reports by other governments. CESNUR claimed these texts relied excessively on information supplied by the anti-cult movement and criticized them publicly, particularly through a book called Pour en finir avec les sectes. Canadian scholar Susan Jean Palmer wrote that the title, translated as "To Put an End to the Sects", had a double meaning and was "deliberately misleading", as, rather than to sects of cults, the authors wanted to put an end to governmental criticism of them. French sociologists Jean-Louis Schlegel and Nathalie Luca reviewed the book critically, noting that while the authors were right in criticizing some mistakes of the Parliamentary report, CESNUR had moved with the volume from a scholarly to a militant advocacy position and to a one-sided defense of cults. According to Palmer, the book upset the French authorities so much so that one of its co-authors, French historian Antoine Faivre, was placed by the police under temporary arrest (garde à vue), accused of having disclosed confidential details about the persons interviewed by the Parliamentary Commission, although he was detained for a few hours only and a judge later dropped the charges. In 2001 and 2006 CESNUR published two editions of its encyclopedia of religions in Italy. Organization According to its official website, CESNUR "is a network of independent but related organizations of scholars in various countries, devoted to promote scholarly research in the field of new religious consciousness, to spread reliable and responsible information, and to expose the very