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The Philadelphia ASR meeting was a great opportunity to see old friends and make new ones—our second largest on record. Over 225 people registered for over forty sessions, including four joint sessions with ASA. The Radisson was a commodious property whose attractive meeting space along with attentive staff met our needs well. Philadelphia temperatures and heat indexes hit some records that made the relatively short jaunt to ASA seem something of a chore, but there was nevertheless good interchange between the meetings. 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 Dipankar Gupta, Jay Demerath’s Presidential Address, several authors-meet-critics sessions, outstanding receptions, and an innovative graduate student mentoring session put together by our student representative Charlene McGrew. David Yamane, who will have officially taken office as Editor-elect of Sociology of Religion by the time you time you receive this, set a new standard of competence and cooperation as this year’s Program Chair.

Our membership remains stable in the high 700s, though libraries continue to slip slightly from where we would like them to be. Virtually all our new subscriptions come from outside the United States, raising our mailing costs. So there remains a continuing need to ask you to 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 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 it. All memberships in ASR are subsidized by our journal subscriptions. Continuing slippage in subscriptions will have higher membership and meeting costs as a result.

Our general financial health as far as our investment principal is concerned remains strong. We are, however, continuing to experience reduced flows of interest income, consistent with the bond market in general. However, Council was able to restore additional funding in the amount of $2,500 to the Fichter grant program for 2006. Last January we were also able for the first time in several years to add some funds from our operating surplus to our general reserve, in addition to your designated gifts that support our grant programs. We also received significant financial support toward our annual meeting expenses from the Program for Research on Religion and Urban and Civil Society and the Program for Religion and Social Policy Research at the University of Pennsylvania, thanks to efforts on the part of Local Arrangements chair Ram Cnaan, as well as from Jay’s department at the University of Massachusetts and from Brill in celebration of the renewal of the Religion and the Social Order series.

I have already mentioned the outstanding work of Charlene McGrew, a graduate student at Penn, with respect to the mentoring session. She also organized several other workshop-style sessions with special relevance to graduate students. I am happy to add that she has agreed to continue in this capacity in 2006. We also ask those of you who have new graduate students arriving in the next few weeks to put ASR before them as an important avenue for professional development.

The most curious aspect of this year’s meeting was not knowing where we will meet next year! That’s right: After switching New York and San Francisco meeting years last fall, ASA ultimately decided in mid-July to dump San Francisco entirely. This is due to labor issues between the principal ASA hotels and the unions who represent their workers. A decision this late in the game introduces both geographic and financial uncertainties. The most likely locale is Montréal, but don’t start boning up on your French quite yet. Nothing has been signed, and in fact, the ASA Meeting Coordinator has not yet even been to Montréal. Things look good, at least from their perspective, on paper. We hope they will look good for us too. But ASR definitely will meet someplace in 2006.

Ruth Wallace chaired the Joseph H. Fichter Grants Committee this year; Barbara Denison will do so next year. Recipients of this year’s Fichter Grants are: Walter Bower, University of Kentucky, "Religious Markets and Church Selection among Racial and Ethnic Minorities: Bringing Social Inequality Back In"; Catherine Fobes, Alma College, "Gender and Race Inequality in College Ministry: Building the Episcopal Campus Church in Florida, 1924-54"; Melanie Heath, USC, "Fighting for Marriage: Gender, Sexuality, and Christianity in Contemporary U.S. Marriage Movements"; Rebecca Y. Kim, Pepperdine University, "Bridging Racial Boundaries: How Multiracial Churches Work"; Phil Zuckerman, Pitzer College, "Irreligion and Gender Equality: The Case of Scandinavia." Twenty-nine acceptable applications were received this year. Priority will continue to be given to proposals relating to the topics of women-and-religion, gender, and feminist studies; if an insufficient number of proposals of acceptable quality are received to expend the funds, secondary consideration will be given to proposals in sociology of the parish. Joining Barbara and Ruth on the committee for 2006 is Darren Sherkat. Council voted this summer to alter the qualifications for applicants to state that everyone submitting a proposal for funding be required to have been a member of ASR at least during the calendar year prior to application.

Your election ballots were counted, and the results were reported by Nominations Committee chair, Joe Tamney. Jim Davidson was elected 2007 President. He has named Rachel Kraus to serve as Program Chair for the New York meeting. Three Council members were also elected for three-year terms: Fred Kniss, Kay Meyer, and Paula Nesbitt. Jay Demerath will chair the Nominations Committee for the coming year, serving along with Jim Cavendish and Omar McRoberts. Each year we elect a President-elect and three Council members; persons with suggestions for nominees should contact Jay quickly (demerath @soc.umass.edu). Nominees should be able to attend the 2006-2009 meetings, which at this point are all slated to be located Chicago and East, north of the Mason-Dixon line. The person elected to the presidency this year will deliver his or her Presidential Address at the Boston meeting in 2008.

The Robert J. McNamara Award recipient this year was D. Michael Lindsay, a Ph.D. candidate in the sociology department at Princeton, for his paper "Elite Networks as Social Power: New Modes of Organization within American Evangelicalism." The McNamara Award is a designated fund award that may be given annually to an outstanding student paper. Chair of the McNamara Award Committee for the 2006 selection will be Lutz Kaelber joined by Omar McRoberts and Bob Woodberry. Council also voted this year to decouple the McNamara Award from any publication requirements either before or after submission.

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 Chudamani Basnet (University of Georgia), Michael Roemer and Elisa Zhai (University of Texas), joined by overseas scholars Nanlai Cao (Australia/China) and Per Hansson (Sweden). Applications for this funding for 2006 should be directed to Program Chair Peter Kivisto. 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 2006 is $6,000, with up to $3,000 designated for discretionary use, within these guidelines, by the president.

The Religious Research Association and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion will meet 4-6 November in Rochester, New York. The SSSR theme is "Multiplying the Study of Religion." The RRA theme is "Congregations, Denominations and Research on Religion: Promoting Cooperation." Plenary speakers will be Nancy Ammerman and Mark Chaves. The hotel is the Hyatt Regency Rochester. Check out the program on the SSSR website: http://www.sssrweb.org/. The following year’s joint meeting of these two groups will be 20-22 October in Portland, Oregon.

A conference on Children’s Spirituality: Christian Perspectives will be held at Concordia University in suburban Chicago, 4-7 June 2006. The deadline for an initial proposal is 1 February. See http://www.childspirituality.org/. Papers may reflect qualitative, quantitative, historical, or theological research, or models of children’s ministry.

Helen Berger has edited Witchcraft and Magic: Contemporary North America, University of Pennsylvania Press.

Alex Bierman, University of Maryland, received the Taeuber Graduate Student Paper Award from the District of Columbia Sociological Society.

Sally Gallagher’s Sociology of Religion article "The Marginalization of Evangelical Feminism" was selected as a focus piece in the "Discoveries" section of ASA’s Contexts magazine’s Spring 2005 issue.

Peter Kivisto and Wendy Ng have published the second edition of Americans All: Race and Ethnic Relations in Historical, Structural, and Comparative Perspectives, Roxbury Press.

President Kevin J. Christiano, University of Notre Dame (2006)

President-elect James D. Davidson, Purdue University (2006)

Executive Officer William H. Swatos, Jr., Galva, Illinois (2007)

Past-president N.J. Demerath III, University of Massachusetts (2006)

Editor Nancy Nason-Clark, University of New Brunswick (2006)

Editor-elect David Yamane, Wake Forest University (2009)

Book Review Editor Lori G. Beaman, Concordia University, Montréal (2006)

2006 Program Chair Peter Kivisto, Augustana College

Graduate Student Representative Charlene C. McGrew, University of Pennsylvania

2007 Program Chair Rachel Kraus, Ball State University

James A. Beckford, University of Warwick (2006)

Pauline Côté, Laval University (2006)

Douglas Cowan, University of Waterloo (2006)

John Bartkowski, Mississippi State University (2007)

Lori G. Beaman, Concordia University, Montréal (2007)

David Yamane, Wake Forest University (2007)

Fred Kniss, Loyola University Chicago (2008)

Katherine Meyer, Ohio State University (2008)

Paula Nesbitt, University of California, Berkeley (2008)

Fichter Grant: Barbara Denison, Shippensburg University (chair)

Ruth Wallace (2006), Darren Sherkat (2008)

Finance: John Bartkowski, Mississippi State University (chair)

Fred Kniss (2007)

International Coordination: Jerry Pankhurst, Wittenberg University (chair)

Pauline Côté (2006), Fenggang Yang (2007)

McNamara Award: Lutz Kaelber, University of Vermont (chair)

Membership: W. Bradford Wilcox, University of Virginia (chair)

Nominations: N.J. Demerath III, University of Massachusetts, Amherst (chair)

James Cavendish (2006), Omar McRoberts (2006)

Publications: Fred Kniss, Loyola University Chicago (chair)

No new manuscripts for Sociology of Religion should be sent to Nancy Nason-Clark. All new materials from the moment you read this newsletter should go to David Yamane at the Department of Sociology, POB 7808, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 27109; sored@wfu.edu. A comprehensive Web site for the journal will also be available shortly to expedite the submission-to-publication process, and a new book review editor will be announced. In the near term, contact David before sending any books for review, and do not send further books to Lori.

The ASR’s Religion and the Social Order annual volume series is once again moving forward, now with Brill Academic Publishers. Fenggang Yang and Joe Tamney’s State, Market, and Religions in Chinese Societies was formally launched at the beginning of this year’s annual meeting, with a reception co-hosted by Brill. ASR members who wish to edit such a volume are invited to submit proposals to the Executive Office to consist of the following: Title and brief rationale for the volume, names of contributors who have given a tentative commitment to write for the volume and the topic area or specific chapter title for each, and a date by which all of the materials could be submitted to the editorial board for review.

The proposed collection must be a minimum of 150 pages of actual text in length, submitted in Word, preferably in English (though volumes in Spanish and French will be considered). Tables and black-and-white illustrations/photographs may be included with the text but should not be considered in the page count and must be either camera-ready or electronically available. No previously published material will be considered in the original language of publication. All contributors will receive copies of the work. A small stipend may also be available if the submitted work requires no further editorial hand. Volumes should be thematic and ideally should contain materials that would not be considered competitive with Sociology of Religion. Monographic volumes, including translations, are acceptable for consideration, as would be argument-and-response or debate volumes, also volumes that might reflect "perspectives on" a topic from a variety of viewpoints within the sociology of religion—e.g., perspectives on the 2004 US presidential election, perspectives on the Iraqi War, perspectives on the role of 9/11, perspectives on art and architecture, perspectives on teaching.

Three more volumes are currently in the pipeline: pilgrimage and tourism, the history of American sociology of religion, and religion and immigration. We are free to produce as many volumes as we wish, as long as we produce at least one volume a year. You are, at the same time, asked to note the title of the series and ensure that your proposal addresses it—viz., Religion and the Social Order. The series is not a general religious studies series, no would topics in religion and personal adjustment be appropriate.

The next meeting of the ISA will take place in Durban, South Africa (see http://www.ucm.es/info/isa/ congress2006). One of the primary aims of the RC22 Board is to ensure the visibility of both religion itself and the sociological study of religion in the morning sessions (i.e., the plenary meetings) of the Durban Conference—in addition, that is, to providing a full slate of sessions for the afternoon and evening general sessions. The current RC22 Board asks that you consider membership in RC22, especially if you are already an ISA member. RC22 also maintains two Web sites, to which you may go for further information: http://www.ucm.es/info/isa/rc22.htm and http://www.cmq.edu.mx/isarc22.

On the surface of it, another annual meeting has passed successfully. We had a number of outstanding sessions, and while attendance across sessions varied greatly, some rooms were packed. The camaraderie was good. People met to work on research projects, to plan collaborative volumes, to gripe about administrators, and simply to renew old friendships. Beneath this, however, lies an ongoing problem: increasing costs. This fourth issue of the current volume of News & Announcements is being sent to all of our members in hard copy this year, rather than simply via a postcard notice of an Internet posting, in order to do the most we can to get across to as many we possibly can the financial constraints that surround our annual meetings.

Repeated surveys across the years have shown that ASR members want to meet at the same time as and as spatially close as possible to the ASA meetings. This preference limits the economics of hotel selection—and hotel selection means not only where we hold our sessions themselves, but also where we sleep and have the majority of our food functions. In addition, because of its size and structural constraints, ASA is limited in the number of cities where it can meet. For example, prior to the current San Francisco crisis, in three out of the coming four years, ASA had chosen to meet in three of the most expensive cities in the country. These decisions mean both higher room costs and lower value on the dollar for money spent on receptions. While we can look at reducing the number and quality of receptions, the nature of the conference business is that regardless of exactly how we apportion our dollars for these events, we have to meet certain dollar minimums to obtain favorable hotel contracts. It’s sort of "they get you coming or going." Furthermore, we also have to meet minimum contracted room night numbers. But that’s not all: the room night numbers are limited to those placed through the reservation process we initiate with our preregistration materials. Put simply: if you use a reservation service other than the one that comes in our preregistration packet or stay at another hotel entirely, it costs ASR money. Ultimately, since ASR has no significant funding source for its meetings other than the membership, the result of obtaining hotel rooms other than through the ASR preregistration process will be higher costs to ASR, and these can be met only by increasing registration fees or dues (or both). For more, see http://www.sssp1.org/index.cfm/m/23/m/178

This concern is further heightened by the issue of the loss of library subscriptions. We need you to be vigilant about maintaining library subscriptions at your institutions that carry the journal and to work vigorously for it at institutions that do not. A hundred new library subscriptions could more than make up for the increased meeting costs of the high-cost cities. Sociology of Religion is good value for the money spent, even at library rates, but librarians must be convinced that it is worth the shelf space. Put simply, students must actually use the journal. Gone are the days when libraries could afford to have hard-copy journals on the shelves just to look good. We must demonstrate the "use value" of our journal.

Concurrent with that, we need to work to recruit more colleagues into ASR. A story: last year both the ASA executive officer and I were involved in a case at a state university on the West coast surrounding the teaching of sociology of religion in a sociology department. At the heart of the controversy lay the rather strange notion of "syllabus plagiarism": a person had expected a job teaching sociology of religion that arose as the result of the sudden retirement of a colleague, then had the job pulled out from under her on the grounds her syllabus "plagiarized" her predecessor’s. Forget that. What manifested itself to me was that no one in the whole business was a sociologist of religion. No one belonged to any of the professional societies in the social scientific study of religion. No one knew that ASA produced a teaching guide for the sociology of religion that contained sample syllabi that could be adopted. (I don’t think anyone even knew at the start that there was an ASA section in the sociology of religion.) None of the half-dozen or more standard texts in the sociology of religion was on the syllabus. This was no Podunk college of 200 students struggling to stay alive, but a faculty of 6-8 full-time people, plus adjuncts. You would recognize it immediately as a "real" four-year-plus state university. These specific circumstances of "syllabus plagiarism" are unique, but I think the tendency to present sociology of religion in guises that sociologists of religion would not ourselves immediately recognize as representative of our work may be widespread. We who are the Association for the Sociology of Religion need to be vocal advocates of our discipline throughout the profession, not merely in those institutions where our own bread is buttered.