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Volume 43, Number 1 Fall 2008

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Our 2009 meeting will be held August 8 – 10 in San Francisco. The beautiful and historic Sir Francis Drake hotel, situated right in the heart of beautiful Union Square/downtown, with the trams rolling by, will be our conference location. Please plan to come and revel in the wide range of intellectual, cultural, aesthetic, and culinary delights that San Francisco invariably delivers.

This year’s theme is Religion, Culture, Politics. We want to encourage renewed exploration of the persistently complex relations that exist among religion, culture, and politics in local, regional, national, and global contexts. We welcome a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding how these intersecting forces variously shape and impact institutional and societal practices across diverse settings. Though the theme encompasses a broad swath of issues, we also, of course, welcome paper submissions on topics not directly related to the theme. Please review the call for papers in this newsletter and follow the instructions there. This newsletter includes all of the relevant paper or/and proposal submission information you will need.

In addition to the regular panel sessions, we will also have the annual Furfey lecture and reception, and several mentoring and networking opportunities for graduate students and new faculty. I am also happy to report that this year we will have two panel sessions co-sponsored with ASA as high-profile ASA thematic sessions. Our joint sessions will engage the theme chosen by ASA President Patricia Hill Collins, "The New Politics of Community." One session, organized by ASR President-elect Rhys Williams, will examine "The New Politics of Religious Communities: Managing Diversity and Inequality." The second, which I organized, focuses on "Religion in the Reshaping of Political Community: Comparative Perspectives."

All the best for a good winter. We are blessed to live during such historic and exciting times. I hope that our meeting in San Francisco will enable us to achieve new insights in understanding the questions we set before us. I look forward to seeing you in San Francisco in August.

Michele Dillon

University of New Hampshire

After many months of study and negotiations, we can now announce definitively that Sociology of Religion will be published by Oxford University Press, beginning with the first issue of 2009. To be perfectly clear: the ownership and editorial control of the journal remains with ASR. David Yamane will stay on as editor, but we will also begin to take steps across the spring and summer to recruit an Editor-designate—a person who would ideally be approved by the Council at its meeting this summer. More about that in coming issues of N & A.

We made the decision to go with Oxford after extensive study of many publishers and intensive negotiations with two, which then narrowed to one. We did this for a number of reasons, though the three most prominent were: (1) Oxford’s ability to provide an on-line platform, both for readers and for the editor. (2) Increasing complications in dealing with pro-duction and distribution tasks, not merely with respect to on-line access, but also with the postal system. (3) Our commitment to our authors and potential authors that their work reach as large a readership as possible at the lowest cost to our members, without sacrificing quality. We also noted that OUP has an outstanding reputation as a scholarly press, and like the ASR, it is a not-for-profit corporation.

We anticipate that the Spring issue will appear on time. David has already attended (at Oxford’s expense) a conference for sponsoring publishers, and by the time you are reading this, he will also likely have had OUP come to work with him in making the transition to their editorial platform. This will include a new on-line submission and refereeing process that should further streamline the front-end work of the publishing process, hence speed the submission-to-publication turn-around time, which should work to everyone’s advantage.

If you are at an institution that does not presently subscribe to Sociology of Religion, please consider this change in our publishing arrangements as an opportunity to encourage its adoption (or re-adoption) in your library.

Dues notices for 2009 were sent earlier this fall. If you did not receive a dues notice, that means you already paid your 2009 dues, either in connection with the 2008 annual meeting or in a pre-pay situation from a previous year. We appreciate the response to the first dues mailing. Those who have not yet responded will find another notice in this mailing. Please attend to this now. Consideration of a session or paper proposal for the 2009 annual meeting requires 2009 membership. You will find the form here.

ASR 2009 Grant Programs

The ASR has three annual grant programs, for which some details appear below. Further information may be found on the ASR Web site, www.sociologyofreligion.com, or by contacting the chair of the program whose email address is included in the program description.

The McNamara Award in the amount of $500 is given annually to recognize an outstanding graduate student member’s paper in the sociology of religion, although the award committee is always free to withhold the award in the event that no papers of distinction are received. The chair of the Mc Namara Award Committee is Prof. William Mirola (mirola@marian.edu). The submission deadline is 1 June. Submission should be in the form of articles with a maximum length of 40 double-spaced, single-sided pages inclusive of all material. The title page should include an abstract of no more than 200 words. Text should not exceed 12,000 words (i.e., approximately 36 double-spaced pages of 12 point [10 cpi] type. Submissions should take the form of a file formatted in Microsoft Word. Alternatively, a CD containing the file may be mailed. Responsibility for the timely submission of useable materials to the proper address rests entirely with the applicant. An additional $500 is available upon application from the awardee to assist with travel expenses to the annual meeting on a reimbursement basis.

A total of $24,000 is available to fund members’ research in either of two areas, prioritized as follows (1) women and religion, gender issues, and feminist perspectives on religion; (2) religion and poverty. Anyone submitting a proposal for funding is required to have been a member of ASR at least during the year prior to application. A proposal of not more than five double-spaced pages should outline the rationale and plan of the research. A detailed budget and vita should be attached. Simultaneous submissions to other grant competitions are permissible only if the applicant is explicit about which budgetary aspects the Fichter Grant will cover that do not overlap with other submissions. The chair of the 2009 Fichter Grant Committee is Barbara J. Denison (bjdeni@ship.edu). Send four copies of the application to Barbara at POB 211, Mechanicsburg, PA 17055. Submissions must be postmarked by 1 March 2009. Awards will be announced 1 May, at which time the moneys will also begin to be available. Except for the size of the total purse, there is no upper limit to the amount of funding that may be requested by an individual applicant for a Fichter Grant. In addition, a purse of $2,000 is available to assist prior grantees to travel to the meeting to present results of research funded by their Fichter Grant.

Gallagher grants to assist with travel to attend the ASR annual meeting are offered annually by the ASR Council to graduate students and non-US/Canadian scholars whose papers are accepted for inclusion on the program. A total of $3,000 is available for the 2009 meeting. Grants are normally in the amount of $600 for foreign colleagues and $300 for domestic graduate students. Gallagher Grants may never exceed $1,000. Grants are paid in cash to the recipient at the meeting. Application must be made to Program Chair Melissa Wilde (mwilde@sas.upenn.edu), and final grants are determined by a committee composed of the Program Chair, President, and Executive Officer. Persons in need of travel assistance should indicate their circumstances at the time they submit their program proposal or abstract. This should take the form of a letter in which the applicant indicates a specific dollar request, states the reason for the request, and provides reasonable evidence that funds to cover the balance of the trip are in hand.