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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.

A sample of 77 clergymen and 136 lay leaders, all of them members of the Lutheran Church in America, was taken in northern Illinois. It was found that even in this relatively conservative denomination, clergy, tended to give more liberal responses than laity on a variety of social and political issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a reply to professor William L. Kolb of the Department of Sociology, Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. The reply came in response to Kolb's views on the evaluation of his article "Images of Man and the Sociology of Religion," by the author. According to the author, his reaction to Kolb's criticism must remain a complex combination of agreement and disagreement. Kolb's response to the author's earlier comment strengthens the impression that Kolb is more concerned with a personal position than with one which he insists, is an indispensable frame of reference for the social scientist in the role as a student of the relations between religion and society. A secondary indication of this is included in Kolb's withdrawal of the term "orthodoxy" as describing the position he is objecting to. However, Kolb still speaks of the "neo-positivism," which places values within the framework of a total socio-cultural determinism and which treats values solely in terms of a socially integrative function rather than treating society as a value-realizing system. The author flatly refuses to accept this as an accurate characterization of his own position.