News and Announcements

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The Boston ASR meeting was a great opportunity to see old friends and make new ones. We had approximately 250 people registered for forty-nine sessions, including three joint sessions with ASA, one of which was an ASA thematic session. The Park Plaza is an elegant historic property, which we shared with SSSP, thus the place was really buzzing with sociologists. The weather was beautiful, though hot, throughout our stay. The number, variety, and quality of restaurants within easy walking distance were also a great treat. 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, "Principle," by University of Nebraska—Kearney poet and professor Allison Hedge-Coke and Mary Jo Neitz’s Presidential Address, "Encounters in the Heartland: What Studying Rural Congregations Taught Me about Working Across Difference." We also had three author-meet-critics sessions, several professional development seminars, and a "fourth annual" graduate student mentoring session put together by our student representative Kevin McElmurry. We were also happy to see a number of colleagues from abroad and Canada. We hope to see an even larger international contingent when we move to San Francisco in 2009.

As an organization, our membership currently stands at 732, which is very encouraging, with libraries numbering 630. These numbers are almost identical to those in this issue of N&A last year. It is still the case that virtually all our new library subscriptions come from outside the United States, and mailing costs for subscriptions to international addresses increased dramatically last year and also increased this year at a much higher rate than domestic postage, though nowhere near as bad as last year’s increase. More about the future of SoR appears later in this issue. In the meantime, however, please continue 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 levels of personal membership in ASR are subsidized by library subscriptions. Continuing slippage in subscriptions will have higher membership and meeting costs as a result.

In respect to these and related issues, Council took three specific steps:

1. With the membership consenting at the General Business Meeting, we amended our by-laws to shift the dues payment dates from January-to-March to November-to-January. Dues will be due 1 November, late 1 January. The principal reason for this is a careful review of why we have so many difficulties pulling the annual meeting program together—we don’t know who our members are and are not when the submission period and the dues paying period are the same. Under the new system, anyone who has not paid by 1 January will not be a current member when s/he submits materials for program consideration, q.e.d. It will not be the responsibility of the Program Chair/Assistant to collect dues.

2. We have entered into concrete negotiations with Oxford University Press to assume responsibility for the printing and circulation of Sociology of Religion. Whether this will take place with the 2009 issues or have to wait until 2010 is unclear as of this writing, but it is very unlikely that it will not take place at all.

3. An ad hoc committee to be chaired by Jim Cavendish was appointed to look into commercial placement and maintenance of the ASR Website in order to render it more interactive.

At the same time that we undertake these changes, I want to reaffirm that our general financial health as far as our investment principal is concerned remains strong. One of the peculiarities of investing as we do, however, is that market fluctuations appear in our receipts between six months and a year after they actually happen. Thus it is likely that we will see some significant income reductions in income payments in 2009, perhaps as the economy itself is taking an upturn. The 2009 budget, however, continues to reflect our positive cash flow in the form of membership benefits.

I have already mentioned the work of Kevin McElmurry, a graduate student at the University of Missouri (Columbia). We also ask those of you who have new graduate students as this term begins to put ASR before them as an important avenue for professional development. Although we are not experiencing anything like a "membership crisis," it is important to keep ASR visible to the rising generation of sociologists of religion. Since the founding of the ASA section on the sociology of religion, there is not only more space for sociologists of religion on the ASA program but also a degree of misunderstanding about the two organizations and what each has to offer. Both your editor and I continue to be a bit surprised by the numbers of grad students and younger scholars who think they are ASR members because they are members of the ASA religion section—not really knowing the difference.

We are grateful to both Boston University and Brill for financial contributions that helped support our receptions this year. Meeting at the same time and place as ASA imposes a variety of costs on us, while comparably limiting the reasonable amount we can charge for registration. Hotel meeting costs will only continue to rise, as will ASA’s registration fees that are also paid by many of our attendees. As a comparable example, the SSSR/RRA preregistration fee this year is $85 ($40 more than ours was this year), while its hotel rooms are $50 less than what we paid in Boston.

Barbara Denison chaired the Joseph H. Fichter Grants Committee this year and will do so again next year. This year’s grant recipients are: William H. Swatos, Jr., Augustana College, "Lourdes at 150: Pilgrimage Religiosity, Secularization Theory, and Gendered Religiosity"; Barbara Mann Wall, University of Pennsylvania, "Clash and Compromise: Catholic Hospitals, Secularization, and the State in 20^th Century America"; and Julie Zaloudek, "Christian Protestants’ Perceptions of God as Masculine and/or Feminine and Gendered Family Roles." Six acceptable applications were received this year. Members of the committee for 2009 are Susan Eisenhandler, Michelle Fugate, and Brian Starks. Barbara Denison will con-tinue as chair. Everyone submitting a proposal for funding is required to have been a member of ASR at least during the calendar year prior to application. The total amount of funding available for grants is $24,000, to be allocated at the committee's discretion. In addition, $2,000 is available to assist prior grantees to travel to the meeting to present the results of their research funded by their Fichter Grants. This money will be allocated upon application to the Program Committee.

Your election ballots were counted, and the results were reported by Nominations Committee chair, Jim Davidson. Rhys Williams was elected 2010 President. He has named Gerardo Marti to serve as Program Chair for the Atlanta meeting. Three Council members were also elected for three-year terms: Lynn Davidman, Dan Olson, and Melissa Wilcox. Mary Jo Neitz will chair the Nominations Committee for the coming year, serving along with Wendy Cadge and Bill D'Antonio. Each year we elect a President-elect and three Council members; persons with suggestions for nominees should contact Mary Jo quickly (neitzm@missouri.edu). Nominees should be able to attend the 2009-2012 meetings, which at this point are slated for San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago, and an undetermined West Coast site. The person elected to the presidency this year will deliver his or her Presidential Address at the Chicago meeting in 2011.

The Robert J. McNamara Award recipient this year was Jeremy Uecker, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Texas (Austin), for his paper "Religious and Spiritual Responses to 9/11: Evidence from the Add Health Study." The committee also gave Honorable Mention to a paper by Philip Connor, of Princeton University, ’Immigrant Religiosity in Canada: Multiple Trajectories." Nine papers were submitted and evaluated. The McNamara Award is a designated fund award in the amount of $500 that may be given annually to an outstanding student paper. Chair of the McNamara Award Committee for the 2009 selection will be Bill Mirola joined by Michael Lindsay and Wendy Cadge. A travel grant of up to $500 is also available to assist the award winner with expenses to attend the annual meeting.

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 Bolaji Bateye and Musa Adeniyi (Nigeria), Damaris Parsitau and Susan Kilonzo (Kenya), Afe Adogame and Andrew Yip (UK), Soyoung Park (Korea), and grad students Kristen Geraty and Yuting Wang. Applications for this funding for 2009 should be directed to Program Chair Melissa Wilde. 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 $500 and to $800 for foreign colleagues. In no case will a grant exceed $1,000. The grant pool for 2008 is $6,000, with up to $3,000 designated for discretionary use, within these guidelines, by the president.

Two volumes of the Brill-published, ASR-sponsored "Religion and the Social Order" series were released at this year‘s annual meeting, North American Buddhists in Social Context, edited by Paul David Numrich, and Religion and Diversity in Canada, edited by Lori Beaman and Peter Beyer. ASR members will have another opportunity to purchase these volumes at special rates with the dues notice that will be included in the fall issue of News & Announcements. ASR members who wish to edit a volume in this series 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. One volume for 2009 release has already been committed. Manuscripts for 2010 should be finished by late fall 2009. The proposed collection must be a minimum of 150 pages of actual text in length, submitted in Word. 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 honorarium is provided to the editor upon publication.