Although largely sociological, the study was interdisciplinary, and included both insider and outsider perspectives into the coven; Stave was an initiate and a practicing Wiccan while Scarboro and Campbell remained non-initiates throughout the course of their research.

Gardnerian Wicca revolved around the veneration of both a Horned God and a Mother Goddess, the celebration of eight seasonally-based festivals in a Wheel of the Year and the practice of magical rituals in groups known as covens.

The first of these had been the practicing Wiccan, journalist and political activist Margot Adler in her Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, which was first published by Viking Press in 1979.

The results of Berger's 11 years of research would come to be published by the University of South Carolina Press in 1999 as A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States, to predominantly positive academic reviews.

Sponsored by the Dana Foundation, the seminar took place in Autumn 1990, and involved six professors from various U.S. colleges meeting together in Atlanta to share their research into various different aspects of religion and discuss conceptions of duality between the mind and the body.

[11] One of the academics attending the seminar, Shirley "Holly" Stave, a literary critic and untenured faculty member at Emory, soon admitted to the group that she was a practicing Wiccan, and told them of her belief that her religion could provide "a way of reuniting mind and body.

However, as they later noted, "poststructural theoretical perspective[s]" had shown that "pure objectivity is never possible", and that the "context of each researcher – gender, race, socioeconomic level, sexual orientation, one's biography as a whole – shapes that person's understanding.

"[16] The anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann (born 1959) of the University of California, San Diego, published a review of both Living Witchcraft and Loretta Orion's Never Again the Burning Times (1995) in the Journal of Anthropological Research.

She proceeded to note that in her opinion, the "eye-opening" feature of the book was its examination of what life was like for public Witches living in the Deep South, a predominantly conservative and Christian part of the United States.