______________________________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________________________

The New York ASR meeting was a great opportunity to see old friends and make new ones. We had a record-breaking 257 people register for forty-nine sessions, including three joint sessions with ASA. The Marriott Marquis was a spectacular property whose attractive meeting space along with attentive staff met our needs well. In addition, the morning temperature on Thursday the 9^th set a record low, so the threat of melting on the walk between our property and the SSSP and ASA sites was comparably reduced. The number and variety of restaurants within easy walking distance was also a great treat, as were a number of Broadway theaters within a stone's throw. 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 Indiana State Representative Joe Micon and Jim Davidson’s Presidential Address. In addition to Joe’s very engaging presentation, we also shared in a presentation by him, on behalf of the Governor of Indiana, of a "Distinguished Hoosier" award to Jim. We also had a record six authors-meet-critics sessions, outstanding receptions, and a "third annual" graduate student mentoring session put together by our student representative Tia Pratt. We also had a significant number of colleagues from abroad and Canada. We hope to see an even larger international contingent when we move to Boston in 2008—one of those one-in-four years when there is no other major competing international meeting in the summer.

With respect to organizational statistics, our membership currently stands at 731, which is very encouraging, with libraries numbering 632. A growing concern is the fact that virtually all our new subscriptions come from outside the United States, and mailing costs for subscriptions to international addresses increased 100% this year. In the near term, we are able to absorb this through an across-the-board library subscription increase of $10 (to $85) for 2008. Please continue to do everything you can to see that your institution has and will maintain a paper 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 our library 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. Last year we achieved an important benchmark for nonprofit organizations with respect to our reserves—specifically we now have twice our current annual expenditures in reserves. Both fund managers and the IRS consider this the appropriate level of reserves for a nonprofit agency. As a result, this means that more of our current annual income can be directly returned in the form of additional membership benefits. Extending beyond the increased Fichter grants and additional travel funds for both Fichter and McNamara grantees that we implemented in 2007, this year we will be working to upgrade our Web site and to provide professional assistance to facilitate the annual meeting program submission process, which has become increasingly time and energy consuming for both the Program Chair and Executive Officer.

Mention has already been made of the outstanding work of Tia Pratt, a graduate student at Fordham, with respect to the mentoring session. She also organized several other workshop-style sessions with special relevance to graduate students. Kevin McElmurry from the University of Missouri (Columbia) will serve in this capacity in 2007. 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. We will be making a special effort during the coming year to work to attract graduate student and younger faculty members. 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.

As some of you will recall, we had a variety of problems last year due to the vacillation on the part of ASA that led us to Montréal. One of the by-products of that was that we had very little outside support for our meeting—something we count on especially for the costs of our receptions. That was not the case this year. We are grateful to both Fairfield University, Jim’s undergraduate alma mater, and the Purdue University Department of Sociology and Anthropology, along with Brill, the publisher of our Religion and the Social Order series, for financial contributions that brought significant support for our receptions. New York City is outrageously expensive, so their help was even more necessary and appreciated. Again, meeting at the same time an place as ASA imposes a variety of costs on us, while comparably limiting the amount we can reasonably charge for registration, given ASA/SSSP’s fees that are also paid by many of our attendees. As an alternative example, the SSSR/RRA preregistration fee this year is $55 ($15 more than ours), while its hotel rooms in a comparable property in Tampa are only two-thirds the price of ours in New York ($109, compared to $169/79).

In other matters of general interest to the membership:

Barbara Denison chaired the Joseph H. Fichter Grants Committee this year and will do so again next year. This year’s grant recipients are: Jody Caldwell, Drew University, "Founding and Development of Thriving Independent Catholic Churches"; Nanlai Cao, Australian National University, "Gender Agency and the Making of Religious Identity among Christian Communities in Reform-era Urban China"; Gwendoline Malogne-Fer, EHESS, "Gender and Polynesian Identities in Migration (New Zealand)"; Geraldine Mossiere, University of Montreal, "The Conversion of Western Women to Islam and the Production of Gender Identity: A Comparison between France and Canada"; Babak Rahimi, University of California San Diego, "Gender and Sectarianism in the Formation of the United Iraqi Alliance"; William H. Swatos, Jr., Augustana College, "An Alter Altar to Parish Religiosity?" Ten 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 religion and disaster. Members of the committee for 2008 are Darren Sherkat, Susan Eisenhandler, and Brian Starks. 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 $22,000, 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 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, Kevin Christiano. Michele Dillon was elected 2009 President. She has named Melissa Wilde to serve as Program Chair for the San Francisco meeting. Three Council members were also elected for three-year terms: Jim Cavendish, Laura Leming, and Robin Perrin. Bill Swatos was reelected Executive Officer. Jim Davidson will chair the Nominations Committee for the coming year, serving along with Lori Beaman and Milagros Pena. Each year we elect a President-elect and three Council members; persons with suggestions for nominees should contact Jim quickly (jdavidso@purdue.edu). Nominees should be able to attend the 2008-2011 meetings, which at this point are slated for Boston, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Chicago. The person elected to the presidency this year will deliver his or her Presidential Address at the Atlanta meeting in 2010.

The Robert J. McNamara Award recipient this year was Christopher Scheitle, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Penn State, for his paper "Leadership Compensation in Christian Non-Profits." The committee also gave Honorable Mention to a paper by Ariane Zambiras, of the University of California Berkeley, "Reversing the Causality: Considering the Impact of Politics on Religion." Six 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 2008 selection will be Bill Mirola joined by Bob Woodberry amd Michael Lindsay. 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 Ulf Borelius (Sweden), Giuseppe Giordan (Italy), and grauate students Deborah Coe, Suzanne Fournier (both Purdue), and Shane Sharp (Wisconsin/Madison). Applications for this funding for 2008 should be directed to Program Chair Jim Spickard. 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, American Sociology of Religion: Histories, edited by Anthony J. Blasi, and Vocation and Social Context, edited by Giuseppe Giordan. 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 for review. The volumes for 2008 are already committed. Manuscripts for 2009 release should be finished by late fall 2008. 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 language of its original publication. Each contributor receives a copy of the book. A small honorarium is also provided to the volume editor upon publication. In recent years the annual meeting’s opening night reception has been the venue for the release of new series volumes.