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The Atlanta ASR meeting was a great opportunity to see old friends and make new ones. About 200 people registered for forty-seven sessions. The Omni Hotel, being set half-inside the CNN complex presented a sometimes surreal aspect, but functioned generally well for our needs. This issue of News & Announcements will summarize the major reports presented to and actions taken by Council, provide a list of our committees, as charged in the by-laws, and try to give you some sense of where we have been and where we are headed.

Highlights of the meeting included the Paul Hanly Furfey lecture by David Martin, Grace Davie’s Presidential Address, an Authors’ Reception on the opening day that recognized participants in the five authors-meet-critics sessions, sharing the Furfey Reception with the ASA Sociology of Religion section’s awards program, and a series of sessions put together by colleagues from France under the general rubric of "exceptionalism." The only real "downer" of our meetings was that the Great East Coast Power Outage kept several of our participants—including editor Nancy Nason-Clark and book review editor Lori Beaman—from being with us.

We are now able to say that our membership took a clear decline at the time of the spring 2002 renewals. We don’t really know why. The good news is that the decline does not appear to be a continuing trend, as we had more members by annual meeting time in 2003 than we did in 2002. Our library subscrip-tions were adversely affected this year by the defalcation of a major subscription agency. They are gradually coming back, but there is a likelihood the some will never return, as institutions must make up for this default against their own budgets. Now more than ever, we must ask that you do everything you can to see that your institution has and will maintain a subscription to our journal. We do reap some benefit from the increasing use of on-line reference services and encourage you to point your students in that direction as well—but these are not nearly as direct a source of revenue as a journal subscription. Including journal-based assignments within your syllabi is one of the most effective ways to ensure continuation of subscriptions among existing holdings and to argue for acquisition of Sociology of Religion in institutions that lack a subscription or have dropped it.

Our general financial health as far as our investment principal is concerned continues to be strong. We are, however, experiencing reduced flows of interest income, consistent with the bond market in general. These will result in decreased amounts of grant funding in 2004.

Last year Council authorized the appointment of a graduate student representative to Council, as a presidential appointment. This year Marie Friedmann Marquardt served admirably in the position. She worked hard to promote ASR among graduate students, and we want to see this position continue. In 2004 Paul Yunsik Chang, a graduate student at Stanford, will serve in this capacity. We also ask that those of you who have new cohorts of graduate students showing up in the next few weeks remember to put ASR before them as an important venue for professional development.

Although absent in the body, Nancy Nason-Clark nevertheless was present in the form of a report given by Assistant Editor Barbara Fisher-Townsend. As a part of that report, Nancy asked that Council begin now its search for a new editor for Sociology of Religion. Council accepted her suggestion, and that search will begin later this year under the leadership of Publications Committee chair Kevin Christiano.

Manuel Vásquez chaired the Fichter Grants Committee this year; Paula Nesbitt will do so next year. Recipients of this year’s Fichter Grants were Adina Batnitzky, "Cultural Constructions of Obesity: Islam, Gender, and Social Change in Morocco"; Lori Beaman, "Exploring the Labyrinth: Lived Religion as a Map and a Movement"; Barbara Fisher-Townsend and Nancy Nason-Clark, "Repairing Shattered Trust: Can Female Partners of Men in Faith-Based Treatment Programs for Batterers be Optimistic about Change," Marie Friedmann Marquardt, "Learning to be Men in el Norte: Gender, Religion, and Mexican Transnational Migration"; Laura Leming, "Religious Agency in a Minority Context: Catholic and Christian Women in Southern India"; Elizabeth Ozorak, "Spiritual Transformation through Ecumenical Pilgrimage in Britain," and Olga Tchepournaia, "Women’s Involvement and Roles in Russian Orthodox Communities During the Late-Soviet and Post-Soviet Periods." Twenty-two applications were received this year, requesting funding totaling $106,492.65 against available funding of $13,000. Next year the total purse will be $10,000.

This year also included the triennial review of the Fichter program. The committee proposed that for the next triennium there be a two-tier review process. In each year, proposals relating to the topics of women-and-religion, gender, and feminist studies will receive first priority; if an insufficient number of proposals of acceptable quality are received to expend the funds (as has happened two out of the past four years), then proposals in a second topic area will be considered. These topic areas will differ each year and will focus on other areas of Fichter’s interest, as follows: 2004 NRMs, 2005 race and ethnicity; 2006 sociology of the parish. Joining Paula on the committee for 2004 are Julia Howell and Ruth Wallace.

Your election ballots were counted, and the results were reported by Nominations Committee chair, Eileen Barker. Jay Demerath was elected 2005 President. He has named David Yamane to serve as Program Chair for the Philadelphia meeting. Three Council members were also elected for three-year terms. They are Jim Beckford, Pauline Côté, and Doug Cowan. Grace Davie will chair the Nominations Committee for the coming year, serving along with Bob Beckley and Nancy Eiesland. Each year we elect a President-elect and three Council members; persons with suggestions for nominees should contact Grace quickly (g.r.c.davie@exeter.ac.uk). Nominees should be able to attend the 2004-2007 meetings. The person elected to the presidency this year will deliver his or her Presidential Address at the New York meeting in 2006. Some question was raised about ASR balloting procedures this year, and in addition to selecting candidates, the 2004 Nominating Committee will look into formalizing and standardizing this aspect of elections, which is currently left open by the Constitution and By-laws.

The Robert J. McNamara Award this year went to Nanlai Cao, a graduate student at Fordham University, for a paper entitled "Negotiating the Sacred in the Ethnic Enclave: Youth Adaptation Processes in a Chinatown Church." This is a designated fund award that may be given annually to an outstanding student paper. Chair of the McNamara Award Committee for the 2004 selection will be Lutz Kaelber joined by David Sikkink and Amanda van Eck Duymaer van Twist.

From its operating budget the ASR makes funds available in the form of Ralph A. Gallagher Grants to assist graduate student members as well as foreign scholars with meeting expenses. Recipients who attended this year were US graduate students/younger scholars Sally Gradle, Elisa Zhai, and Elaine Howard Ecklund, joined by Véronique Altglas (France), Effie Fokas (Greece), and Olga Tchepournaia (Russia), and overseas senior scholars Ezra Kopelowitz (Israel), Pratap Kumar (South Africa), and Fabienne Randaxhe (France). Applications for this funding for 2004 should be directed to Program Chair, Fenggang Yang. It is important that persons desiring Gallagher funding make their needs known as early as possible and do so in the context of both a clear abstract for their presentation and an accounting of how they intend to provide the necessary additional funding to attend the meeting. Gallagher Grants are supplemental grants, intended primarily to pay "on the ground" expenses at the meetings and will not meet the entire costs of travel to the meetings. In general, grants to North American graduate students are limited to $300 and to $500 for foreign colleagues. In no case will a grant exceed $1,000. The grant pool for 2004 is $6,000, with up to $3,000 designated for discretionary use, within these guidelines, by the president.

Now that this year’s meeting is over, we want to draw your attention to the San Francisco meeting, 13-14 August 2004. This promises to be another excellent meeting. The formal program call will be included in the next issue of News & Announcements, but it is already on the Web site—and it’s not too early to put it on your calendar. Contact Fenggang—ASR2004@soc.purdue.edu —with program suggestions and proposals. The meeting will be held at the Ramada Plaza Hotel International, only a few blocks from the ASA venue—all on level ground.

The Religious Research Association and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion will meet 24-26 October in Norfolk. The SSSR theme is "Religion in Motion." The RRA theme is "Religion and Contem-porary Culture: Exploring the Intersections of Religious Research." Featured plenary speakers will be Otto Maduro and Robert Wuthnow. The hotel is the Sheraton Norfolk Waterside. Check out the program on the SSSR website: www.sssrweb.org. Paper calls have also been issued for the 2004 joint conference, to be held 22-24 October in Kansas City. The RRA theme is "Linking Social Action and Religious Research," contact bartkowski@soc.msstate.edu. The SSSR theme is "Overcoming Boundaries in the Scientific Study of Religion," contact swatos@microd.com.

The BSA Sociology of Religion Study Group plans a Study Day 15 November at Kingston University. The theme is "Religion and Marginalization." The deadline for submitting proposals is 12 September. Send a 300 word abstract to s.moore@kingston.ac.uk. Also forthcoming is the Study Group’s Annual Conference, 29 March-1 April, "A Sociology of Spirituality," to be held at Clifton Hill House, University of Bristol. For this conference write kieran.flanagan@bristol.ac.uk. The annual conferences are fully residential and provide an excellent opportunity to interact at length with British colleagues. More information and forms can be obtained from the Study Group’s Web site: www.socrel.org.uk.

A conference entitled Challenges of Religious Plurality for Eastern and Central Europe, will be held 11-14 December in Lviv, Ukraine. The deadline for proposals is 10 September. Contact dinka@idi.hr

A conference entitled Religión, pobreza y violencia en el contexto de la crisis neoliberal will be held 7-10 July, hosted by the Department of Socioreligious Studies of the Center for Psychological and Sociological Research, Havana. Proposals are due 31 December. Contact: cuartoencuentro@cips.cu