With the San Francisco meeting now behind us, we are looking ahead to our 2015 meeting in Chicago. The theme for the 2015 meeting is “Understanding Religious Change.” Melissa Wilde is the 2015 President, and Grace Yukich is the 2015 Program Chair. The details of the meeting and the Call for Papers can be viewed on the ASR website at www.sociologyofreligion.com.
Our hotel will be the Renaissance Blackstone Chicago Hotel, which is located at 636 South Michigan Ave., right next door to the main ASA hotel, the Hilton Chicago. We will continue our two-day meeting pattern, with the ASA Religion Section meeting the day following. This means that our opening night reception will be on Thursday, August 20th, our sessions will be on Friday and Saturday, August 21st and 22nd, and the ASA Religion Section will be on Sunday, August 23rd. There will be approximately five simultaneous sessions each day, followed by the Presidential and Furfey Lectures, respectively, in the early evening on the 21st and 22nd. For the first time, we will co-sponsor a joint reception with the ASA Religion Section in the ASA hotel on Saturday evening, August 22nd, immediately following the Furfey Lecture.
Please be attentive to both the submission dates and ensuring that your 2015 dues are paid. A dues notice was e-mailed in November to remind members to renew their membership. Because 2015 membership in ASR is required for program consideration (one author, for multi-authored papers), if you haven’t joined or renewed your membership in the Association, please do so on the ASR website before attempting to submit a proposal. Please DO NOT submit a proposal if you cannot arrange to be available during any of the time slots that the Program Chair may assign your paper presentation during any of the days of the conference. Anyone who will present a paper or serve as a panelist, discussant, or book critic during the conference must be an ASR member and be willing to register for the conference. Session organizers should make this clear to anyone they invite to participate in a session or serve on a panel.
The period for submission of session proposals is strictly limited to January 1 – March 31, 2015, while the submission period for individual papers extends through April 30, 2015. Please visit the ASR website at www.sociologyofreligion.com for submission guidelines and for access to the online submission portal. All individual paper proposals must now be submitted directly through the website.
Regardless of whether or not you anticipate being on the program for 2015, I hope you will plan to attend the annual meeting in Chicago. Given the close proximity of our hotel to the ASA hotels, the 2015 meetings promise to have an even higher level of exchange and cooperation between the conferences. Best wishes to all of you in this holiday season and for 2015.