ASR NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS
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Volume 39, Number 3 Spring 2005
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PHILADELPHIA: THE PRELIMINARY PROGRAM
The 2005 ASR preliminary program is now on our Web site, Click Here to view it. Persons without Web access who want a paper copy or who want a Word file emailed to them may contact the Executive Office bill4329@hotmail.com. It is an exciting program, and I hope you will attend. We have more sessions specifically directed toward students (see especially the mentoring session, K4, which requires preregistration) as well as outstanding thematic presentations featuring colleagues from around the world. Now it is time for you to respond by completing your preregistration materials.
Your preregistration entitles you to save money and also is of enormous assistance to us in making adequate plans for the meeting to serve everyone most effectively. Preregistration requirements will be strictly enforced, both in terms of program participation and charges. Try to firm up your plans in the next few days, and send in your materials.
Please note, in particular, the following:
× If you are on the program, you must be a current ASR member. (In the case of co-authored papers, this requirement is met by one of the authors being a member, but note that all co-authors attending the meeting must pay registration fees. )
× If you are on the program, you must be preregistered.
× The deadline for preregistration is July 1. If mailing, use only first class/air mail to return your preregistration forms.
× Those not on the program are also encouraged to preregister. On-site registration fees will be higher for all categories of attendees.
× The New Attendees Welcoming Breakfast is available only by preregistration.
Our meeting preregistration form is part of this mailing. Information concerning our hotel is also contained here. The hotel will not be using forms, so you must work from this newsletter when making your reservation, either online or by phone. You are urged to ask for a written confirmation, if you make your reservation by phone. The online service allows you to generate your own confirmation immediately.
Note, too, that you may pay 2006 dues at this time, using the preregistration form, even if you are not attending the meeting. If you choose this option, make sure you put your name on the form!
Getting There
Philadelphia is the hub for USAirways, which provides both domestic and international routes. It is also served directly by the US discount carriers SouthwestAir and AirTran. In addition, direct Amtrak service to Philadelphia is provided from both Newark and Baltimore-Washington International Airports. This opens additional options for international travellers; however, you should also understand, when comparing prices among airports, that these train services are not free! A local train service also runs from the Philadelphia airport into the city, and it is very reasonably priced. You can pay on/at the train. Within the US, Philadelphia is directly accessible via both East-West and North-South Amtrak routes and via public bus services.
About the Hotel
We are based at the Radisson Plaza-Warwick Hotel. This is an exceptionally well-restored, historic hotel, in the Rittenhouse Square area of the city, in easy walking distance of the ASA properties. You are reminded that this year we begin the same day as ASA, since the ASA Religion Section day is at the end of the ASA meetings. Our block holds through that day, so you do not have to change hotels to participate in both meetings.
The deadline for hotel reservations is 9 July. It is later than the preregistration deadline, but only a limited number of rooms are available, so reserving early is in your best interest. If you have difficulty making reservations with the hotel before the deadline, please contact the Executive Office at once (309-932-2727; <bill4329@hotmail.com>). After the deadline, there’s not a lot we can do to help you.
It is important that you stay at the ASR hotel. Last year we paid extra hotel charges due to lack of adequate hotel registration on the part of our meeting attendees—in spite of having the largest meeting registration in our history!
Here's how you make reservations: Go to the hotel Website—www.radisson.com/philadelphiapa. When you get there, enter the dates you want and the number in your room. Then enter the promotional code ASR. You should get a screen that gives you a base rate of $134/night, single or double. Check your accommodation preferences and make your credit arrangements. When you are done, you can print a copy of your package. If you prefer to phone, the number of the hotel is 215-735-6000. Ask for reservations, and then state that you are with the Association for the Sociology of Religion (i.e., not simply “ASR”) group and proceed from there.
Registration and the Book Exhibit
Our registration desk will be open Friday from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m., Saturday and Sunday from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.; Monday from 8:00 to 1:00. We should be able to have the book exhibit open daily from noon Saturday, with pick up of purchases Monday from 8:15 to 10:15, and the final sale from 10:15 ’til noon. Doublecheck when you arrive! Also, plan to join Council for the opening reception on Friday night. Further details of that event will be included with your preregistration confirmation. You can still have a book included in the book exhibit if you will send author, title, and full publisher address to the Executive Office by 1 June.
Audiovisual Equipment
ASR will try to provide overhead projectors on an as needed basis. We will be contacting presenters via email in advance to assess these needs. In general, overhead projectors are provided when they are necessary to present materials in a way that it is not reasonably possible to do through printed handouts. These are standard overhead projectors, using transparencies, not powerpoint. The ASR does not provide other audiovisual equipment. You must either bring your own or make arrangements with the hotel’s a/v service provider, for which contact the ASR Executive Office.
Preconference Tour
We have made arrangements for a preconference walking tour of Philadelphia, “A Holy Experiment”: Philadelphia Across Three Centuries, to leave from our hotel at 1:45 p.m. on Friday, with an expected return prior to the Council meeting at 5:00. If you are coming into the city early, either for Council or because of travel schedules, this is an excellent way to start off your visit. It is a professionally organized tour with special attention to ASR’s interests, with the following description:
“The colony of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia in particular were founded on the ideal of religious freedom. Despite the persecution Quakers faced in England, William Penn insisted that the Quakers open the colony (and its government) to all faiths. Thus began an experiment in diversity that continues to this day. This tour will explore the attempt to live up to Penn’s ideal across three centuries, and we will look at times of great triumph and great failure. In the late 18th century, Richard Allen and other African-American leaders founded the first African Methodist Episcopal Church, Mother Bethel. Soon the city earned the title ’Cradle of the Black Church,‘ as other mother churches were founded in the early 19th century. In the mid-19th century, anti-Catholic riots burned churches to the ground in a city founded on religious freedom. In the early 20th century, the Jewish population doubled in 15 years, transforming neighborhoods as numerous synagogues were founded. While some historians have argued that Penn’s ’holy experiment‘ failed rather quickly, the tour will highlight how the debates over religion have changed across Philadelphia’s history and how the city has changed across three centuries.”
The cost of the tour is $15 for everyone except ASR student members, who may pay only $10. Preregistration and prepayment is required, and we will inform those who have preregistered in advance if there is an inadequate number of persons for the tour to go forward, with reimbursement included in registration packets.
Religion and the Social Order
We have reasonable expectation that Fenggang Yang and Joe Tamney’s edited collection, State, Market, and Religions in Chinese Societies, volume 11 in the revived ASR “Religion and the Social Order” series will be available at the meeting. A number of the chapters in this volume were presented at last year’s meeting. The Saturday sessions on Pilgrimage and Tourism at this year’s meeting are expected to provide the core for next year’s volume in the series.
The series is now being published by the Brill publishing house of Leiden, the Netherlands. The ASR members’ price is $29.95; $32/35 mailed US/elsewhere (surface). You may purchase this volume whether or not you are preregistering for the meeting. For matters of convenience, the members’ price will be a limited-time offer for each volume, ending with the membership renewal period this winter.
EUREL
The EUREL website, which aims to provide accurate and up-to-date information on the social and legal status of religion in European countries, is now accessible: http://eurel.u-strasbg.fr
The EUREL project is carried out by PRISME—Société, Droit et Religion en Europe (a research unit of the CNRS and the Université R. Schuman-Strasbourg III), in collaboration with the Groupe de sociologie des religions et de la laïcité (GSRL, a research unit of the CNRS and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes). Information is provided a checked by a network of correspondents who are specialists in law or the social sciences. The EUREL website is regularly updated with new material and through the inclusion of additional countries. At present most pages on the site are in French. Translation, however, is currently underway; soon all the information will be available in both French and English.
Lina Molokotos-Liederman, our 2003 program chair, has had a major hand in this project.
News of Members, Publications, and Conferences
This may or may not be the first place you see it, but you need to know: The venues for the 2006 and 2007 ASR/ASA meetings have been exchanged. Next year we will return to San Francisco (but not to the same hotel, rather the Sir Francis Drake), while we will go to Manhattan in 2007. This has to do with labor issues that arose in San Francisco this fall, causing a number of organizations either to cancel or hastily move meetings. We apparently came close to dancing the last tango in San Francisco this past August, before the strikes began. So while we will, of course, be putting out the standard program calls and related information as time goes on, those of you who might have been thinking about what you would do “in New York next year” need to know that it’s not happening “in New York” next year. I hope in the meantime that as many of you as possible can plan to be with us and stay with us in San Francisco next year. (And for those of you who are real advance planners: the tentative sites for 2008 and 2009 are Boston and Chicago. We are beginning to look at Boston hotels now. The Boston dates are quite early: our first day will be the last day of July.)
Network, the newsletter of the British Sociological Association, features a cover-story interview of Roland Robertson in its Spring issue. In addition to items of biographical interest, the piece provides insights into the development of at least one important strand of globalization theory.
The February issue of Sociology, the BSA’s journal, features three articles in a lead subsection on “Religion in Contemporary Britain.” Included among the authors are ASR members David Voas and Andrew Yip.
Helen Berger has recently published an edited volume, Witchcraft and Magic: Contemporary North America with the University of Pennsylvania Press.
The RRA and SSSR will meet 4-6 November in Rochester, New York. Presidents Dan Olson and Nancy Ammerman are both ASR members. Nancy will deliver her presidential address this year, while RRA will feature our colleague Mark Chaves as its H. Paul Douglass lecturer. (Dan’s is a two-year sentence.) It’s nice to feel at home again at these meetings, too, thanks to our colleague Larry Greil, who does a superb job as SSSR Executive Officer.
If you like going to meetings and Philadelphia, you can also come back here 19-22 November for the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion.
Back Issues of the Journal: A Request
If any of you has good-condition issues of Sociological Analysis from prior to the mid-1970s or of the American Catholic Sociological Review, the Executive Office would very much like to have them, if you no longer want them. As those of you who have read the various histories of the ASR know, virtually all of our records prior to 1968, including all journal back issues, were lost in a fire. In addition, in the period immediately following that, no systematic effort was made to maintain a set of office-copy journals. Hence, we have no office-copy set. There is a complete set in our archives at Marquette University, because Marquette subscribed to the journal from the first. Microform editions are also available. But there are times when requests for information come to the Executive Office that we simply can’t answer at a moment’s reach—and it would be nice to. So if you happen to be at the age where you’re “downsizing” your holdings, here’s one place where at least some of them would be welcome.