The Winter issue of News and Announcements contains a slate of candidates who will in turn be called upon to give future leadership to the ASR. The names this year have been provided through the work of Past President José Casanova (chair), Roberto Cipriani, and Ruth Wallace. They offer hard choices, but these choices are themselves a sign of the outstanding scholarship that is to be found among our ASR colleagues. The Executive Officer is particularly grateful to the committee for the timeliness of its work. Please vote! Please also follow the voting instructions so that your vote counts.

You are reminded of our 63rd Annual Meeting in Anaheim, 17-19 August, particularly in this newsletter through the book exhibit request form. We depend primarily on your responses on this form for the exhibit, and we will try to do our utmost to obtain the books you request. You should know that not all publishers—including one of my own publishers—are cooperative with us in regard to the book exhibit. Any word you can put in to y/our publisher(s) cannot hurt. Note the deadline of 1 April on both the ballot and the request form! The Spring issue of N & A will contain the preliminary program for the meeting, hotel and travel information (in the meantime, see the ASR website: <www. sociologyofreligion .com>).

I am happy to report that in spite of the market gyrations that occurred in fits and starts during the last half of 2000, our reserve and designated funds remain in exceptionally good health. We had a favorable cash-flow balance at the end of the year, which places additional funds into our general reserve. A number of you have taken the opportunity to make contributions along with your dues, and these are much appreciated. Please do not be standoffish about making donations to the ASR!

Please be attentive to the fact that the deadline for Fichter grant applications is a 1 March postmark. Also, Gallagher grant requests should have been submitted with your annual meeting abstract. If you did not submit a Gallagher award request with your abstract and wish to be considered in that funding, you should send a letter of need to the Executive Office (<swatos@microd.com>) as quickly as possible, and no later than 1 March. (You do not need to send a letter to the Executive Office if you have already sent one to Pat Wittberg.)

Receipt of the print version of this newsletter is confirmation that your 2001 dues have been paid. Thank you for your support of ASR. Think about a colleague you might goad into joining you and us. Also think about library subscriptions. Our end-of-year memberships ended at a record high of over 800, but our library subscriptions continue to slip. Library subscriptions are critical to the ASR’s continued financial health—and reasonable prices for your dues!

 Bill Swatos

GRACE DAVIE

Reader in Sociology at the University of Exeter, Grace completed her doctorate at the London School of Economics, with a thesis on the political aspects of the French Protestant community in the 20th century. She is the current holder (2000-2001) of the Kerstin Heselgren Professorship at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and has also been a "professeur invité" at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and the École des Haute Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She is the co-author of Inner City God: Religious Belief in the Inner City (1987), and author of Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (1994) and Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates (2000). In addition, she has co-edited Identités religieuses en Europe (with Danièle Hervieu-Léger) and Modern France: Society in Transition (with Malcolm Cook). She is currently preparing the Sarum Theological College Lectures, which will be published as Europe, the Exceptional Case: Parameters of Faith in the Modern World (2001). Grace is on the editorial boards of six major journals, both in Europe and America. She has convened the British Sociological Association's Sociology of Religion Study Group and the International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR/SISR), in the latter case bringing together 300+ scholars from over 30 countries for two major conferences in 1995 and 1997. She has been a member and chair of the International Coordination Committee of the ASR, a member of Council, and will serve as Program Chair for the 2002 meeting in Chicago.

RHYS H. WILLIAMS

Associate Professor of Sociology at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Rhys completed his Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1988. Rhys's research interests are on the intersection of religion, politics, culture, and social movements. He co-authored (with Jay Demerath) A Bridging of Faiths: Religion and Politics in an American City (1992); he co-edited Sacred Companies: Organizational Aspects of Religion and Religious Aspects of Organizations (1998) and edited Cultural Wars in American Politics: Critical Reviews of a Popular Myth (1997) and Promise Keepers and the New Masculinity: Private Lives and Public Morality (a 2001 book format reprint of vol. 61, no. 1 of Sociology of Religion). His articles have appeared in, among others, the American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Theory and Society, JSSR, Sociology of Religion, and Current Perspectives in Social Theory. His 1999 article in Sociology of Religion, "Visions of the Good Society and the Religious Roots of American Political Culture," won the 2000 Distinguished Article award from the ASA’s Sociology of Religion Section. Rhys was Program Chair for the ASR annual meeting in 1993, and served as a member of the Executive Council from 1994-1997. He has also served on the Membership Committee and is currently finishing a term on the Publications Committee. Rhys’s most recent research focuses on the Youth and Religion Project, in collaboration with R. Stephen Warner. They are examining young people and their orientations to and affiliation with religious institutions.

PATRICIA M.Y. CHANG is the Assistant Director for the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life and Associate Research Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Patty has published numerous articles on religion, organizations and the careers of female clergy. She has published in JSSR, Sociology of Religion, International Organizations, Sociological Theory, NVSQ, and other outlets. She has reviewed books and manuscripts for most of the major publishers and sociological journals and has received numerous research awards and grants. She is currently working on a book that explores how theological understandings of authority affect conceptions of democratic participation in Protestant denominations.

JOHN A. COLEMAN, S.J. is the Casassa Professor of Social Values at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. Among John's books are The Evolution of Dutch Catholicism (University of California Press 1978), An American Strategic Theology (Paulist 1983), One Hundred Years of Catholic Social Teaching (Orbis 1991), Religion and Nationalism (Orbis 1995), and he is preparing a book on parachurch organizations and citizen activism for the University of Illinois Press. John gave ASR’s 1998 Furfey Lecture, "The Bible and Sociology," and was the recipient of CARA’s annual Lubzetak Award for Excellence of Research on the Church in 2000. His current research focuses on Catholic Charities U.S.A.

LORNE L. DAWSON received his Ph.D. in religious studies from McMaster University in 1986, and is currently Associate Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Religious Studies Department at the University of Waterloo. He is the author of Reason, Freedom, and Religion (Peter Lang 1987) and Comprehending Cults (Oxford University Press 1998), and editor of Cults in Context (Transaction 1998), in addition to publishing 38 refereed articles and chapters in books, which deal primarily with theoretical and methodological issues in the study of religion and the study of NRMs. He has twice served as an Associate Editor of Sociology of Religion and has been on the executive council of the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion.

VICTORIA LEE ERICKSON is Associate Professor of the Sociology of Religion at Drew University. Her recent publications include "Georg Simmel: American Sociology Chooses the Stone the Builders Refused," in the Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion (2000) and Terror: A Witness to Justice in the Human Community (Fall 2001). Victoria’s current research focuses on creating models for evaluating outcomes of urban faith-based community-development projects and on representations of the holy in urban architecture. She has served the ASR as Chair of the Fichter Grant Committee and as a member of the Nominating Committee. She was also elected to the first council of ASA Sociology of Religion Section.

PREMA KURIEN is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. For 2000-2001 she is a fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion, Princeton University. Her work has focused on the reformulation of religion and ethnicity by Indian migrants from different religious backgrounds, both in India and the U.S. Prema is currently working on two manuscripts, "The Emergence of American Hinduism" and "From Minority to Majority: The Travails of an Asian Indian American Church." An earlier manuscript, "Kaleidoscopic Ethnicity: International Migration and the Reconstruction of Community Identities in Kerala, India" is under review. In addition, she has several journal articles and book chapters in edited collections.

MANUEL A. VASQUEZ is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Florida. He is the author of The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity (Cambridge University Press 1998), which received the 1998 American Academy of Religion award for excellence in the study of religion. Manuel is also co-editor of Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas (Rutgers University Press 2001). In addition, he has published articles in such journals as Sociology of Religion, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Religious Studies Reviews, and Theory, Culture & Society. He has received grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Lilly, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations; he has also been a Visiting Fellow at the Center for the Americas at Wesleyan University.

NEWS OF MEMBERS

With regret, we report the death of Mary Curry, a member of the faculty at the University of Houston. Mary had fought a long battle with cancer. For many years she took responsibility for organizing the Women’s Caucus breakfast at the SSSR/RRA meetings.

The Spiritual Supermarket: Religious Pluralism and Globalisation in the 21st Century, a conference principally organized by INFORM and CESNUR in cooperation with a number of other, principally European, groups will be held at the London School of Economics, 19-22 April. The submission deadline has passed, but registration is still possible. Contact inform@lse.ac.uk.

The 24th annual Denton Conference on Implicit Religion, will be held 11-13 May. Contact: eibailey@ csircs.freeserve.co.uk.

The 2001 SISR/ISSR meeting will be held at Ixtapan de la Sal, 20-24 August, immediately following the ASR meeting in Anaheim. The theme is Interpreting Religion Today: Competing Processes and Paradigms. For further information, contact the SISR secretariat lfontaine@ustanne.ednet.ns.ca.

The Association of Muslim Social Scientists 30th Annual Conference will be held 26-28 October at the University of Michigan, Dearborn. The theme is Religion and Public Life in the Global Epoch. The deadline for abstracts is 15 May. For further information contact dkelli@iiit.org.

OPPORTUNITIES

A collection to be edited by Mohammed Bamyeh and Randall Halle seeks essays on postnational culture. The call for papers includes "religious organizations" as one of several "possible arenas for examining novel trends in association and solidarity . . . The basic aim of this collection is to ascertain the extent to which forces of globalization are causing shifts at the basic level of cultural identity and cultural life." If you think you might have something to contribute contact Randall Halle at the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627.

Believe it or not, the new editors of the American Sociological Review, Charles Camic and Franklin Wilson are looking for manuscripts in the sociology of religion. Times they are a’changin.

The International Shinto Foundation is advertizing its Shinto Essay Competition, with prizes of $1,000, 500, and 300, for essays of 8 to 10 double-spaced pages on one of the following subjects: Shinto's Encounter with Buddhism, Shinto's Contribution to the World Culture of Peace, or Shinto and Gender. Contact the International Shinto Foundation, New York Center, 777 United Nations Plaza, Ste WCRP-9A, New York, NY 10017. The deadline for submissions is 15 May.

PUBLICATIONS

Peter B. Clarke has edited Japanese New Religions in Global Perspective (Curzon). Kieran Flanagan and Peter Jupp have edited Virtue Ethics and Sociology: Issues of Modernity and Religion (Palgrave). Liz Fawcett has written Religion, Ethnicity and Social Change (Palgrave).