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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 examines the impact of controlled access highways on nonmetropolitan population growth between 1940 and 1970 in the state of Pennsylvannia. Minor civil divisions corrected for boundary changes were used as areal units in the research. With a longitudinal analysis, the authors observed the demographic growth of nonmetropolitan places before and after controlled access highways were opened as well as variations in the impact of the said highways from decade to decade.

The article is based on sociologist Robin M. Williams lecture presented at an annual meeting of Eastern Sociological Society at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1995. In his important book "American Society" published in 1960, Williams stated that the increased public attention and recognition of the social sciences demand careful self-criticism and continuous revision based on penetrating research and theoretical reflections. The goal of the lecture is to show how diagnosis of social problems and prescriptions for their solution are related, in part, to the analytical concepts one uses. A study that Williams conducted with sociologist Margaret Ryan about community experiences in school desegregation included facts and theories that could have assisted the Supreme Court. A good society achieves its effectiveness by way of both contributive and distributive justice. The gift of poor White families to the society at large is a working model of contributive justice and the gift of poor Black families to the society at large is a working model of distributive justice.

The contention of a limited number of theorists that there exists a form of "community" independent of institutionalized interactions has suffered from lack of supportive empirical evidence. Participants in a Pennsylvania community delineation study spontaneously and vigorously exhibited support for such a conceptualization, in effect refusing to engage in consensual community delineation unless allowed to express in graphic form the personal meaning of community based upon individual interaction patterns. Resultant graphic portrayals could be dichotomized on a "reality" variable, based on selectivity of inclusion. Chi-square analysis indicated relationships between number of children, age, sex, and the type of interactional community projection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]