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The Montréal ASR meeting was a great opportunity to see old friends and make new ones. Over 200 people registered for forty-five sessions, including three joint sessions with ASA. The Hyatt was a commodious property whose attractive meeting space along with attentive staff met our needs well. In addition, the northern clime relieved us of the heat difficulties that sometimes come with a meeting at this time of year, and those who absolutely could not stand the outdoors could avoid it through a variety of tunnels. It was a special treat to have a significantly larger contingent of both new and prior Canadian members present. 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 Bob Wuthnow, Kevin Christiano’s Presidential Address, two authors-meet-critics sessions, outstanding receptions, and a "second annual" graduate student mentoring session put together by our student representative Charlene McGrew. Through the combined efforts of Kevin, Program Chair Peter Kivisto and Local Arrangements chair Martin Geoffroy, a significant number of sessions focused on both religious issues in Canada and Canada/US similarities and differences. We hope to see more of our Canadian friends as we move on to New York and Boston in 2007 and 2008.

With respect to organizational concerns, our membership remains stable, but with a slight declining curve, and libraries continue to slip from where we would like them to be. Virtually all our new subscriptions come from outside the United States, raising our mailing costs. So there remains a continuing need to ask you 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 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. This past 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 in the future more of our current annual income can be directly returned in the form of additional membership benefits. For 2007 this will appear in increased Fichter grants and additional travel funds for both Fichter and McNamara grantees.

I have already mentioned the outstanding work of Charlene McGrew, a graduate student at Penn, with respect to the mentoring session. She also organized several other workshop-style sessions with special relevance to graduate students. Tia Pratt from Fordham University 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.

The most curious aspect of this year’s meeting was the vacillation on the part of ASA that led us to Montréal. This imposed a number of difficulties. Not only were there customs and currency issues, but we also had virtually no one "on the ground" to assist with a variety of local arrangements, including supplemental funds. We are grateful to the University Press of Montréal and to Brill, the publisher of our Religion and the Social Order series, for financial contributions that helped to support our receptions. On the other hand, Montréal also brought a few more book exhibitors than usual, and as perhaps the most ironic twist, though our registration was down a bit against recent years, our room take was excellent! Precisely for the same reason as the difficulties otherwise experienced—virtually no one lived close enough to be a "commuter."

Barbara Denison chaired the Joseph H. Fichter Grants Committee this year and will do so again next year. This year’s grant recipients are: Gary Adler, University of Arizona, "Parishes in the Aftermath: Hurricane Katrina and Organizational Change"; Orit Abishai, University of California Berkeley, "Menstrual Defilement and the Negotiations of Jewish Feminists"; Gladys Ganiel, Trinity College Dublin, "Religion, Identity and the Crisis in Zimbabwe: A Congregational Response"; Kathleen Jenkins, College of William and Mary, "Divorce and Uncoupling in Religious Community"; Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, American University, "Do the Orishas Pick Men over Women? Santeria Practice and Women’s Religiosity"; Jiexia Elisa Zhai, University of Texas at Austin, "Religion and Gender Equality in Contemporary Taiwan." Fourteen 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 the parish. Joining Barbara on the committee for 2007 are Darren Sherkat and Susan Eisenhandler. Everyone submitting a proposal for funding is required to be a current ASR member and also to have been a member at least during the calendar year prior to application. The total amount of funding available for grants is $20,000, to be allocated at the committee's discretion. In addition, Council this year approved a purse of $4,000 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 by the Program Committee.

Your election ballots were counted, and the results were reported by Nominations Committee chair, Jay Demerath. Mary Jo Neitz was elected 2008 President. She has named Jim Spickard to serve as Program Chair for the Boston meeting. Three Council members were also elected for three-year terms: Courtney Bender, Joy Charlton, and Bill Mirola. Kevin Christiano will chair the Nominations Committee for the coming year, serving along with Kirk Hadaway and Mary Gautier. Each year we elect a President-elect and three Council members; persons with suggestions for nominees should contact Kevin quickly (kevin.j. christiano.1@nd.edu). Nominees should be able to attend the 2007-2010 meetings, which at this point are slated for Manhattan, Boston, San Francisco, and Atlanta. The person elected to the presidency this year will deliver his or her Presidential Address at the San Francisco meeting in 2009.

The Robert J. McNamara Award recipient this year was Nanlai Cao, a Ph.D. candidate in the anthropology department at the Australian National University, for his paper "Christian Entrepreneurs and the post-Mao State: An Ethnographic Account of Church-State Relations in China’s Economic Transition." (Those with exceptionally good memories will have a déjà vu moment here, inasmuch as Nanlai previously won this award on a paper recently published in Sociology of Religion, which he completed as a part of his Fordham master's thesis a few years ago.) 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 2007 selection will be Laura Leming. She will be joined by Omar McRoberts and Bob Woodberry. Council also voted this year to provide a travel grant of up to $500 to assist future award recipients with their 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 Inger Furseth (Norway), Sabrina Pastorelli (Italy, completing her degree in France), Richard Rymarz (Australia), and Sophie-Hélène Trigeaud (France). We were a bit surprised that we had no applications from US graduate students. Applications for this funding for 2007 should be directed to Program Chair Rachel Kraus. 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 $300 and to $500 for foreign colleagues. In no case will a grant exceed $1,000. The grant pool for 2007 is $6,000, with up to $3,000 designated for use, within these guidelines, by the president.

The Religious Research Association and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion will meet 19-21 October in Portland, Oregon. The SSSR theme is "Religion v. Spirituality? Assessing the Relationship between Institutional Religious Involvement and Personal Religious Experience." The RRA theme is "Congregations, Denominations and Research on Religion: Promoting Cooperation." Presidential addresses will be given by ASR members Donald Miller and Dan Olson. The hotel is the Marriott Downtown Portland Waterfront. Check out the program on the SSSR website: www.sssrweb.org. The following year’s joint meeting of these two groups will be in Tampa, Florida.

The American Academy of Religion will meet 18-21 November in Washington, D.C. See www.aarweb.org. This year’s meeting’s regional focus is on Africa. The AAR’s 2007 annual meeting will be in San Diego, 17-20 November, with a regional focus on China.

The 29th meeting of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR/SISR) will be held 23-27 July in Leipzig, Germany. The topic is "Secularity and Religious Vitality." Pauline Côté has organized a joint ASR/SISR session on the topic of "Secularity, Religious Vitality and National Myths." For consideration with respect to this specific session, contact her directly at pauline.cote@pol.laval.ca. For more general information, see the ISSR Web site, www.sisr.org. But don’t skip out on ASR to go to ISSR! Arrange your flights through New York, and enjoy a little European vacation between the two meetings. (Though not in all cases, it is often possible to obtain cheaper rates by buying separate tickets on US carriers like Southwest to Newark, then a New York to Europe flight on another airline. For the latter, check especially services like Priceline and Sidestep. Likewise, consider alternative landing sites to Leipzig.)

President James D. Davidson, Purdue University (2007)

President-elect Mary Jo Neitz, University of Missouri, Columbia (2007)

Executive Officer William H. Swatos, Jr., Galva, Illinois (2007)

Past-president Kevin J. Christiano, University of Notre Dame (2007)

Editor David Yamane, Wake Forest University (2009)

Book Review Editor Jerome P. Baggett, Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley (2009)

2007 Program Chair Rachel Kraus, Ball State University

Graduate Student Representative Tia Pratt, Fordham University

2008 Program Chair Jim Spickard, University of Redlands

John Bartkowski, Mississippi State University (2007)

Lori G. Beaman, Concordia University, Montréal (2007)

David Yamane, Wake Forest University (2007)

Fred Kniss, Loyola University Chicago (2008)

Katherine Meyer, Ohio State University (2008)

Paula Nesbitt, University of California, Berkeley (2008)

Courtney Bender, Columbia University (2009)

Joy Charlton, Swarthmore College (2009)

William Mirola, Marion College (2009)

Fichter Grant: Barbara Denison, Shippensburg University (chair)

Darren Sherkat (2008), Susan Eisenhandler (2009)

Finance: Fred Kniss, Loyola University (chair)

John P. Bartkowski (2007), Joy Charlton (2008)

International : Robert Beckley, West Texas A & M University (chair)

Fenggang Yang (2007), Pauline Côté (2008), Enzo Pace (2009)

McNamara Award: Laura Leming, University of Detroit (chair)

Omar McRoberts (2007), Robert Woodberry (2008), Michael Lindsay (2009)

 

Membership: Courtney Bender, Columbia University (chair)

Robin Perrin (2007), Elaine Howard Ecklund (2008)

 

Nominations: Kevin J. Christiano, University of Notre Dame (chair)

Mary Gautier (2007), C. Kirk Hadaway (2007)

Publications: Fred Kniss, Loyola University Chicago (chair)

David Smilde (2008), Peter Kivisto (2009)

 

*Committee chairs serve annual terms, subject to reappointment; when only two committee members’ names are listed, the chair is also a member of the committee.

All new manuscripts for Sociology of Religion should be sent to David Yamane, preferably using the Web site www.sorjournal.org. If you cannot access the site even after emailing David at sored@wfu.edu, then write to him hard copy at: Department of Sociology, POB 7808, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC 27109. The Web site for the journal greatly expedites the submission-to-publication process, and constitutes a potential source of financial savings for the Association. Book review editor Jerome Baggett's address is JSTB, 1735 LeRoy Ave., Berkeley, CA 94709 (jbaggett@jstb.edu). It is important that those of you who have forthcoming or very recent books get them to Jerome quickly and correctly. For cost reasons, we cannot subvent the continued forwarding of books from Canada to Berkeley.

At its opening meeting, Council expressed its appreciation to Nancy Nason-Clark for her six years of service as editor of Sociology of Religion, following close on three years of service in the Presidential cycle. President Christiano presented her with a large pottery bowl designed at the Notre Dame art department, and we also joined with her in expressing appreciation to Lori Beaman for a comparable term as book review editor and to Barbara Fisher-Townsend who was editorial assistant.

The ASR’s "Religion and the Social Order" annual volume series, published in cooperation with Brill, unveiled its second volume, On the Road to Being There: Studies in Pilgrimage and Tourism in Late Modernity, containing contributions by about a dozen of our members, at the beginning of this year’s annual meeting, with a reception sponsored by Brill. ASR members who wish to edit such a volume 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.

The proposed collection must be a minimum of 150 pages of actual text in length, submitted in Word, preferably in English (though volumes in Spanish and French will be considered). 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. Volumes should be thematic and ideally should contain materials that would not be considered competitive with Sociology of Religion. Monographic volumes, including translations, are acceptable for consideration, as would be argument-and-response or debate volumes, also volumes that might reflect "perspectives on" a topic from a variety of viewpoints within the sociology of religion—e.g., perspectives on the 2004 US presidential election, perspectives on the Iraqi War, perspectives on the role of 9/11, perspectives on art and architecture, perspectives on teaching.

Several more volumes are currently in the pipeline: the history of American sociology of religion, the concept of vocation, North American Buddhism, Canada/US religious similarities and differences, and religion and immigration. We are free to produce as many volumes as we wish, as long as we produce at least one volume a year. You are, at the same time, asked to note the title of the series and ensure that your proposal addresses it—viz., Religion and the Social Order. The series is not a general religious studies series, nor would topics in religion and personal adjustment be appropriate.

As I once again have students to entice into projects, this spring I proposed as one alternative a preliminary attempt at trying to understand something about the dispersion of sociology of religion instruc-tion across the country. There are many ways to do this, but with limited numbers of students who were interested and limited time, I decided to begin with our equivalent of what I believe H.L. Mencken called "saharas of the beaux arts"—that is, areas of the country where sociology of religion members and libraries both are clearly absent. There are quite a few of them. Huge sections of America the beautiful are religionsoziologie deficient—or so it would seem by looking at Zip codes to which our mailings do not go.

If you pay any attention to Zip codes at all, you know that the first three digits go with regions or delivery area units. While there is certainly no rule to this, one might reasonably think that every unit ought to have at least one subscriber. At least that’s a place to begin. Turning that around, then, I went through our mailing lists and eliminated any area that had even one subscription. From that subset, I also eliminated any area where subscribers surrounded it. That led to a relatively manageable set of areas that could be distributed among a dozen students for them to try to chase down, principally through the Net. Any of you who teach will know that the quality of the students’ results was uneven. In general, the findings corroborated the empty slots already existing on the list. That is, while we did find a few potential members hiding out there, we found far more of an absence of sociology of religion instruction than we did a host of people teaching without a connection to ASR. There are entire states where there is apparently no sociology of religion being taught! Offsetting the students whose work was somewhat disappointing in quality, others became quite interested and even followed up with phone calls. We discovered that a number of schools that did list the course in their catalogue hadn’t actually taught it in some years, since an instructor left. In another case, a school that used to teach it, doesn’t even teach sociology any more!

Equally surprising to me, as the students turned in the schools’ course offering lists, was the number of institutions offering the sociology of sport, which was largely experimental when I began teaching 30-some years ago. (I started as a child.) While sport may or may not have replaced religion as the principal family activity on Saturdays or Sundays, and while I would certainly argue quite explicitly that sport is not a "functional equivalent" for religion, it nevertheless has drawn the attention, apparently, of both our sociological colleagues and their students. I suppose one could be elitist and say the sociology of sport is "pandering" to reduced standards of scholarship, but if we are sociologically honest, then any sphere of human social activity is as legitimate as any other as a topic of study. The case for the sociology of religion must extend beyond the topical.

I don’t think there is anyone in ASR who does not know the role of the study of religion in the development of sociology. Hence an argument can be made that the study of religion is part of a sociological core—or should be. Sociology of religion is in this sense, I believe, essentially different from many of the other sociologies "of." Religion is part of the basic sociological toolkit. It informs the "being human" in a way that as far as we know sets us apart from other life forms—and not simply technologically. How can we make this case in such a way that not only our colleagues within sociology, but even more those in other fields, can perceive the importance of our contribution both to research and theory within our own discipline and to that more general experience known as "liberal education"?

As we begin another academic year, I would like to encourage you to think about this problem and what we can do to address it. How can we convince our peers that sociology of religion belongs in the curriculum as a broadly available offering that enlarges the vistas of our students on the human situation?