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The article presents information on the annual meeting of the society of scientific study of religion at Vista International Hotel Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This year's theme of religious marginality encourages participants to go beyond core beliefs and practices of members of mainline churches to the expressions of interest or disinterest in religion that are less common religious experience, mixed intermarriage, unclear interpreting "don't know" responses to questions on belief, nonestablishment (religion among street people), or rejections of religion atheism and apostasy. List of topics related to this year's theme would include, denominational switching and conversion, sources of membership change in the mainline churches, apostates and returnees, new nones (apostates) vs. stable nones with no prior ties, inter-religious marriage and religion of children, divorce, religious socialization of children, religiosity and the life cycle, Inter-racial marriage and religion and the Black Church.

This paper analyzes religious socialization as it relates to schooling success. propose and test a multilevel model of involvement in church activities as providing integration and motivation toward schooling success among metropolitan U.S. public high school sophomores. Results indicate that respondents' participation in church activities is related to heightened educational expectations, and that these more intensely religious students score higher on standardized math/reading tests; even while controlling for variables that often show religious effects to be spurious. The hypothesis that church involvement's effect varies by ecological context - it being a better predictor for students in poorer neighborhoods than average or wealthy neighborhoods - was not supported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a reply of the author regarding views expressed on his religious thoughts. He says the journal article is not a useful format for pursuing disputes involving both major issues of the logic of social explanation and technical considerations of data preparation and analysis. The author says that social considerations often seem more germane than the rational choices of autonomous individuals. Diversity of the new world may be more apparent than real is that some of it is due to racial and ethnic duplication. His essay questioned the stereotypes of old world as religious hegemony and new world as competitive pluralism. It identified considerable diversity within British religion and raised the point that the religious diversity of the United States as a whole may not be reflected at the local levels where choices are made. He also pointed that in a general critique of rational choice models of human behavior, he has suggested that they represent an economics rather than a sociology view of human behavior.

A historical perspective is one important path to a more comprehensive level for sociological interpretation. Indeed, it is imperative for an understanding of social change, because the forces leading to change are not directly amenable to social survey techniques. Much historical analysis is limited by a case-study methodology, which tends to be so narrowly focused that the historian hestitates to generalize much beyond that specific instance. Chronicling the actions of individuals or groups, the historian might fail to observe or document social structural factors embedded in the actions' settings. The comparisons and contrasts between Massachusetts and California are the most interesting regional variations in this study. In Massachusetts's religious climate, residents are more likely than in California to be involved in their church, but less likely than Californians to consider religion important in their lives and/or to engage in private pious practices. Indeed, even with controls for Protestant-Catholic variation, these regional variations hold.