ASR News & Announcements

In many ways, the Association for the Sociology of Religion has enjoyed much success over the past year and is in excellent shape as we enter 2025. Our 85th annual meeting was a great success. Highlights of this year’s meeting included Grace Yukich’s Presidential Address, “Queering the Sociology of Religion: The Role of the Margins in Visioning the Future of the Subfield,” and Geneviève Zubrzycki’s Furfey Lecture, “Religious Nationalism in the Twenty-first Century.” We offered a wide range of sessions, including ASR/ASA Joint Mentoring Sessions. Further details about these and other aspects of the annual meeting are available on the ASR website at www.sociologyofreligion.org.

We welcomed our newly elected leadership. Every year we typically elect a President-Elect and three Council members from our membership. Jerry Park is our President-Elect, which means that he will succeed ASR’s current incoming president, Tricia Bruce. The three new Council members, who will serve for 3-year terms, are Jonathan Coley, Nicolette Manglos-Weber, and Brandon Vaidyanathan. Congratulations to all those elected, and thanks to all of the nominees for their willingness to let their names go forward in the election. Grace Yukich, our past president, will be the Chair of the Nominations Committee for our 2025 election.

The planning for our 2025 meeting in Chicago—“Religion and Resilience”—is well underway. We continue moving forward with Oxford University Press as the publisher of our journal and Titus Hjelm, as its editor. See the ASR website for more details.

ANNUAL MEETING

The 2025 Annual Meeting is being organized by our President, Tricia Bruce, and our Program Chair, Eman Abdelhadi. Our hotel will be the Hyatt Centric Hotel Magnificent Mile, which is located at 633 N. Saint Clair Street. We will continue our 2-day meeting pattern, with the ASA Religion Section meeting the day after our conference on August 12th. Our opening night reception will be on Saturday, August 9, and our sessions will be on Sunday and Monday, August 10th and 11th. There will be approximately six simultaneous sessions each day, followed by the Furfey and Presidential Lectures, respectively, in the early evening on the 10th and 11th. The full details of the meeting and the Call for Papers can be viewed on the ASR website at www.sociologyofreligion.org under the Annual Meeting tab.

Please be attentive to both the submission dates and ensure that your ASR membership is current. Because 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. One request for a session change can result in up to eight additional changes. As you can imagine, this can be a headache and next to impossible to schedule. The Program Committee thanks you in advance for your understanding. Anyone who will present a paper or serve as a panelist, discussant, or book critic during the conference must be an ASR member and 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 full-day symposium proposals is mid-January—February 15, 2025. Session proposals should be submitted by March 31, 2025, while the submission period for individual paper abstracts extends through April 30, 2025. Please visit the ASR website at www.sociologyofreligion.org for submission guidelines and access to the online submission portal. All individual proposals must be submitted directly through the website. Log in to your ASR account to submit a session and/or paper abstract. If you experience any trouble logging into your account, please contact me.

Thanks to everyone for your participation in our organization and your interest in Sociology of Religion. I look forward to working with you in the upcoming years. Please feel free to contact me at [email protected] if you have any questions or concerns regarding our association.

Best wishes to all of you for 2025.