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In this editorial the author comments on factors that disqualify papers from publication in the journal. The author offers ten points, both qualitative and quantitative, that contribute to the rejection of manuscripts submitted for publication. A number of elements are addressed including the importance of the title of the article and the concision of the accompanying abstract, the theory, framework and perspectives contained in an article, and the importance of drawing conclusions only suggested by the data in an article.

The article presents an announcement of the annual meeting of Association for the Sociology of Religion, to be held from August 15-17, 1996 in New York. The theme for the meeting, that is understanding religion and society, invites the public to take stock of the connections between religion and other social institutions--the economy, medicine, education, the family, politics and the state, among others--in the U.S. and around the globe. This program welcomes papers on any topic or issue in sociology of religion including religious values, career choices and economic behavior, economic theories of religious behavior, cultural production and religious change within the world system, postmodernism, deconstuctionism and the sociology of religion and other related topics. The chairperson for the program would be Christopher G. Ellison, sociologist, Department of Sociology, University of Texas, Austin. Deadlines for submission of session proposals, abstract, papers due for McNamara student paper award and papers to conveners and discussants are given.

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.

The article focuses on the increasing attention paid to marginal religions by associations dealing with the sociology of religion. The organizations, which promote sociology of religion, include the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and the Religious Research Association. A factor that becomes very noticeable as one examines programs from the 1950s through the 1960s and then over the last thirty years is that they become longer and more complex, as the societies grew, so did their meetings. One effect of this growth was that program themes, while still important, began to determine the character of the individual meetings less and less. One cannot all change our research agendas from one year to the next to suit these themes. Accordingly, as the meetings grew, program themes began to be complemented by the regular appearance of papers and above all sessions on specific recurring subjects. Among these were changing sets of themes that touch on "other" religions. Tracing the appearance, growth, and persistence of these themes showed that, not only is the idea of "otherness" difficult to pin down objectively, it also shifts with time.

When U.S. respondents to soda surveys are asked to report their attendance at religious services, approximately 40% of Protestants and 50% of Catholics claim to attend church in any given week. These survey findings have been widely disseminated. They are prominently and broadly cited though out scholarly, popular and textbook writing on American religion. Such extensive interest makes it all the more important to investigate whether these rates give a true or a distorted picture of religious practice in the United States. A recent paper has shaken confidence in the self-reported church attendance rates. Using counts of actual attendees at religious services rather than self-reports, the study has argued that the true weekly U.S. church attendance rate is approximately half the rate implied by the self-reports. The line of investigation is continued by collecting count-based church attendance data from an additional 31 Catholic dioceses. Including 17 dioceses reported on in the original paper, one is able to calculate count-based church attendance rates in 48 U.S. Catholic dioceses.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Conrad Hackett and Michael Lindsay on Evangelicalism and another by James Alan Neff examining spirituality and the treatment of substance abuse among African Americans.

The article presents the 2005 Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR) Presidential Address, which focuses on how social scientists should practice the study of religion as a community of scholars. The SSSR was founded to promote the study of religions while maintaining high academic, professional, and ethical standards and ensure members employ the scientific method during the investigation. The group employs research strategies that include surveys and observation of religious practices.

This paper examines Reformed clergy across two different settings - the United States and Scotland in an effort to determine how theological orthodoxy is related to political participation. The paper demonstrates that (1) clergy in both settings tend to be politically active (2) the level of clergy political activity tends to be greater in the United States than in Scotland (3) the relationship between orthodoxy and political activity is complex, varying by the specific type of activity examined and (4) while theological orthodoxy and modernist clergy tend to differ in the nature of their political activities, there is no longer a major "gap" in level of political activity between the two groups of ministers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the supply of clergy relative to members and churches in fourteen denominations from 1950-1993. It finds that while in general, membership is declining and the number of churches is remaining relatively stable, the number of clergy continues to increase producing a situation of labor over supply. The paper considers explanations that locate the cause of declining occupational prestige and over supply on the entry of women into the clergy profession. However, it shows that the oversupply problem pre- dated the entry of women into ordained occupations. This pattern supports labor queuing explanations based on the work of Reskin and Roos. Looking at a subset of these denominations in 1983 and 1993, the study also seeks to uncover the consequences of the labor surplus and finds that one result of this over supply has been a dramatic increase in the percentage of clergy working in non-parish ministries. Various explanations of this shift are briefly examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A "supply-side" theory of religion claims that ties between church and state inhibit religious mobilization. The theory also asserts that the weakening of church-state ties is the inevitable harbinger of broad religious pluralism. This paper investigates these claims using the relationship between the state of Utah and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the "LDS" or Mormon church) as a case study. Data demonstrate that the loosening of church-state ties in early Utah coincides with rising rates of religious activity and the emergence of religious pluralism, as supply-side theory predicts. However, these incipient trends were swiftly curtailed by renewed growth within Mormonism, which rebuts the theory's claims. The paper presents several reasons why Mormonism was able to circumvent the predicted effects of religious competition in Utah, and offers these as caveats for supply-side theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decline of liberal Protestantism offers an important canvas upon which to portray a myriad of cultural and structural factors at work within religion, on the one hand, and organizations, on the other. Specifically, this paper argues that the decline represents the structural consequence of Protestantism's liberal cultural triumph on behalf of such values as individualism, freedom, pluralism, tolerance, democracy, and intellectual inquiry. As laudable as these values may be from other perspectives, they can be anathema to mobilizing and sustaining any organization that requires a loyal and disciplined membership. The paper puts religious "strictness" in a broader perspective and reviews several temporal models that specify the effects more closely. These are all at work within the most recent cycle of liberal cultural assertion followed by membership decline in the 1960s. The paper concludes with some strategic implications for the future as various "remnants' seek to stem the tide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Branch Davidians were linked to the Seventh-day Adventist Church by their historical roots, the source of their members, their name (officially the Branch Davidian Seventh-day Adventists), their identity, and their apocalyptic preoccupations, idiom, and paranoias. This paper examines the responses within Seventh-day Adventism to the sudden notoriety of the Branch Davidians. In so doing, it sheds new light on the Branch Davidian tragedy: Because Adventist leaders focused on distancing their church from the stigmatized Davidians, the confusion and misconceptions surrounding the latter's practices and apocalyptic theology were not clarified, and information and resources that might have helped government officials play a more constructive role during the siege were withheld. However, the official response was only one of several within Adventism to the Branch Davidian saga. The paper isolates three divergent responses, which are used as a vehicle for exploring long-term trends within Adventism - its increasing diversity and the strains flowing there from. The uncovering of these differing responses opens the way for an investigation of the pattern of diversity that emerges in a sect that is, in the terms of Stark and Bainbridge, reducing its tension with society and moving toward denominational status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the findings of an exploratory study on astrology and its constituency. To date, there have been few sociological studies of astrology, and little is known about what types of people are interested in the practice. This study's focus was on adherents of astrology who attended an astrology conference. Unlike previous research, the findings of this study show that the characteristics of these astrologers reflect those of the general population, providing a new understanding of a segment of astrology's constituency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, concerns are addressed regarding the validity of the Quest scale introduced by Batson (1976) and Batson and Ventis (1982). Some have wondered whether this scale might be more a measure of agnosticism, of anti-orthodoxy, of sophomoric religious doubt, or of religious conflict, if indeed, it is a measure of anything religious at all. We have reviewed the available evidence regarding validity, much of which has appeared in unpublished research reports, theses, dissertations, or convention papers, and thus has not been widely available. Based on the evidence, we have concluded that the Quest scale does indeed measure a dimension of personal religion very much like the one it was designed to measure: an open-ended, active approach to existential questions that resists clear-cut, pat answers, Concerns regarding the reliability of the Quest scale, which have proved more persistent, are addressed in a companion paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is a reply from the author to sociologists Michael Hout and Andrew M. Greeley for their comment on his analysis of the General Social Survey data on church attendence. Hout's and Greeley's point that a long time series is more persuasive than a short time series is one with which all can agree. As the author has argued here, there is evidence for secularization even in the longer view. At the same time, a major point in the author's original paper bears repeating, These results do not support the idea that organized religion in the United States will eventually disappear. They do suggest however, that there are social forces at work pushing people away from religious involvement. These forces, be they a crisis in religious authority among Catholics or changes in family structure that show up as cohort effects among Protestants, are appropriately referred to as "secularizing." There is evidence of secularization not in the sense of religious extinction but in the sense of social forces pushing in a secularizing direction in the data on attendance at religious services.

This paper addresses the issue of whether religiosity is really multidimensional as suggested by Glock and Stark and numerous other researchers. The "religiosity in 5-D" scales devised by Faulkner and DeJong (1966) to operationalize the Glock-Stark typology were completed by 873 students in 1967 and 656 students in 1970 at a small, private liberal-arts university in Florida. Each of the 5-D scales more than adequately met the minimum criteria of Guttman scaling in both data sets. The results of a factor analysis (varimax and oblique rotation) of the 23 items in both data sets indicated the predominance of the Ideological commitment factor which accounted for 78 and 83 percent of the common variance respectively. A second-order factor analysis confirmed the existence of one general factor. Our conclusion is that religiosity is not multidimensional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a comment on a previous article Prefatory Findings in the Sociology of Missions, by David R. Heise, that appeared in the April 1967 issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Long-neglected theories of social change have undergone an extensive revival in recent years as part of the effort to explain the revolutionary transformations, which are sweeping through the traditional societies of the world. The emphasis was placed at first on "the social consequences of technical change," but more recently it has shifted to a concern for the dynamics of the change process itself. This newer emphasis has served to refocus attention on the agents of communication and persuasion which transmit change both within and between groups, and, more generally, on problems of the diffusion of innovation. The most interesting part of Heise's paper, from the vantage point of theory building in diffusion research, is his emphasis on the target unit at which change-attempts are directed. One hopes that Heise's paper will lead not only to further work along the lines but also to renewed interest, at a more macroscopic level, in the diffusion of Christianity, Islam, and other religious movements in other times and places.

If religion is faith concerning man's fate, how can this faith find expression today? This is a historical question: for all that will follow about shedding received notions and holding tradition in abeyance, this tradition, this received notion of the relevance of history, of man's historicity, cannot be done without in assessing surrender and hence its relevance for religion. There are some expectations, in particular two, that the title of this paper may raise but that are false; they should be dissipated at once. One, there will be no discussion of the social aspects of religion. Nor will there be any comparison between the analysis of surrender and innumerable extant comments on related phenomena, such as religious or mystical experiences. In this late historical phase, when there even is a sense in which we might be past history, or might soon be past history, religion may well appear as the mood embraced in an effort to come to terms with two unanswerable questions-it is the phase in our history in which one knows that these questions are unanswerable.

The article highlights that the Scientific Study of Religion has opened up to new areas of research, to new groups of researchers and new frames. The articles published in the society's journal, "Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion" have moved away from papers on the Protestant Mainline. Looking at twenty-eight issues, beginning with volume 5 and ending with volume 35, the journal published ninety-six articles that could be categorized as focusing on a particular religious group. Of those, sixteen articles were about the Mainline Protestant denominations in the United States. Only one of those was published after 1981. The study of religion was somewhat ghettoized in the discipline. A renewed interest in religion among sociologists was facilitated by the advent of new cultural approaches in sociology. Sociologist Clifford Geertz's work, for example, not only proposed a frame for seeing religion as a cultural system, but perhaps more importantly, Geertz revealed how the analysis of popular expressive forms could be as significant and revealing as the study of high culture or official dogmas. New studies appeared examining faith healing and devotional practices, conversion and individual's search for meaning in a changing society.

The article focuses on the leadership roles filled by women in the academic field of the sociology of religion. It also discusses women's involvement in organizations including the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR), the Association for the Sociology of Religion (ASR), the Religious Research Association (RRA) and the American Sociological Association (ASA). By contrast to ASA, the male dominance of ASR was tempered by the election of at least one or two women presidents in each decade of its existence. Of the four professional organizations included in this analysis, ASR was the first to elect a woman. In fact, it was only five years after its founding in 1938 that the members of ASR elected Eva J. Ross as president. Since then, nine additional women have served as president. Over the entire fifty years of SSSR, there have been twenty-six leaders, each of whom served two-year terms. It was after three decades of male leadership that SSSR members in 1982 elected as their first woman president the theorist whose work informs this paper, Marie Augusta Neal. Since then, four more women have been elected as presidents of SSSR. Over the past forty-one years since its foundation in 1959, the RRA membership has elected twenty-one presidents, of whom only two were women and both served as president in the post-1970 period.

This paper contends that the social scientific study of religion him long labored under a chafing constraint and a misleading premise. It suggests that our primary focus should he on the sacred, and that religion is just one among many possible sources of the sacred .Defining religion "substantively" but the sacred functionally helps to revolve a long-standing tension in the field Broadened conceptions of the sacred and of "sacralization" help to defuse the conflict among the two very different versions of secularization theory the "all-or-nothing" versus the "middle range "Meanwhile, a conceptual typo logy of the sacred pivots around tile intersections of two distinctions (compensatory vs confirmatory and marginal vs institutional,) Tins generates four distinct scenarios the sacred as integrative, the sacred as quest, the sacred as collectivity and the sacred as counter-culture The paper concludes wit/i three admonitions for research in the area [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the occasion of the Secular Coalition for America’s first-ever Congressional briefing as a case study for demonstrating the political advantages a polysemous secular affords secular lobbyists. The briefing, conducted primarily for the benefit of staff members from the U.S. House of Representatives, offers a rare public forum in which the Secular Coalition tried to strike a balance between the two halves of its mission: advocating for non-theists and promoting secular government. In its efforts to fulfill this mission, the Secular Coalition conflates and distinguishes between four distinct meanings of the secular and secularism: the separation of church and state, the secular public sphere, the ideology of nonbelief, and a nascent secular identity. By studying the ongoing efforts of secular activists to redefine the place and meaning of the secular and the religious in American life, this paper contributes to the study of how the secular gets made, who makes it, and why.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church in the United States has been following a well-defined trajectory from sect toward denomination for the past century: it has reduced tensions with its surrounding environment by removing antagonisms between itself and the state and other religious organizations and as its members have become less peculiar in their lifestyles and beliefs and more integrated into society. However, over the past 30 years it has received an influx of immigrants from counties of the developing world who, generally, are more sectarian in their beliefs and behavior and more confrontative of other religious groups than is the typical American Adventist today. This process is especially advanced in some metropolitan areas such as New York, where Adventism has been transformed from a church of Caucasians and African Americans to a body where nine out of 10 members are now "new immigrants? This paper poses the question of whether the influx of immigrants will reverse the trajectory of Adventism in North America, making it generally more sectarian. After considering data gathered primarily in metropolitan New York, it concludes that the flow of immigrants has resulted in a temporary slowing of the movement from sect toward denomination at the local level where the immigrants are concentrated, but that the process of immigrant assimilation ensures that the dominant trajectory will continue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article extends the theory of sect development by showing, through comparative analysis, that the development trajectories of foreign mission churches controlled from a national home base are influenced by the trajectories followed by their home religious bodies. It also suggests that the trajectories of mission churches not controlled by home religious bodies are far more responsive to differing local circumstances. In applying church-sect theory, which has typically focused on schismatic groups within a single society, to national branches of international religious bodies imported as a result of missionary activity or migration, the paper demonstrates that the dynamics can be similar in key ways. In doing this, it builds on Bryan Wilson's employment of church-sect theory in his study of nonschismatic new religious movements in developing countries. The data show that the dynamics in the 204 countries where Seventh-day Adventism has been imported are akin to those in the United States, where its origin was schismatic. That is, even though we would expect that Adventism in most of these countries would he highly sectarian since the members there are mostly first-generation converts, this is not so: the churches there, like the American church, are moving from sect toward denomination. However, when Adventists are compared with Jehovah's Winesses and Pentocostals, both of which are also expanding rapidly in developing countries, it is found that the trejectories taken by all three differ considerably. The strength of ties to a global organization proves to be highly significant in accounting for the directions taken. Since the patterns that emerge in the mission churches of hierarchical, centralized groups tend to parallel those set originally in their home bases, the analysis allows the prediction of the global profiles which such groups will develop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]