Paper Proposals due January 15, 2010 / Full Session Proposals due January 29, 2010 / Papers due June 1, 2010

Summertime in the Pacific Northwest: This year ASREC will hold its annual meeting in conjunction with the Western Economic Association International, which will be meeting in Portland, Oregon. For more information on the WEAI meetings, see www.weainternational.org. ASREC participants will register for the WEAI meeting at the member rate.

Proposal Format: For each paper, please include the presenting author’s name, paper title, and an abstract of 200 words or less. You may submit preliminary drafts if available. For each author, please supply name, institutional affiliation, e-mail, phone number, and mailing address. Submit your paper proposal by e-mail to conference@asrec.org by January 15, 2010. We also welcome proposals for full sessions, which should be submitted by January 29, 2010. Notifications of decisions will occur in mid-February.

Topics/Methods: We welcome submissions on many topics in the social-scientific study of religion and culture, including

•        Religious markets, competition, monopoly, and regulation

•        Economic growth, development, poverty, and inequality

•        Health and religion/spiritual capital

•        Social networks, and social/spiritual/religious capital,

•        Beliefs, attitudes, doctrines, norms, and values

•        Institutions, organizations, congregations, and denominations

•        Extremism, conflict, sectarianism, and religious persecution

•        Religious or social trends, growth, and decline

•        Conversion, switching, proselytizing, and the marketing of religion

•        Religious participation, attendance, and commitment

•        Religious giving, philanthropy, and church finances

•        Demography, fertility, family, marriage, and gender

•        Education, human capital, health, and happiness

•        Race, ethnicity, and discrimination

•        Politics, public choice/finance, church-state issues, and the law

•        Experimental methods, simulation studies, and computational methods

•        Neuroscience and evolutionary theory

Program Chair: Robert I. Mochrie, Heriot-Watt University, R.I.Mochrie <at> hw.ac.uk

ASREC Executive Director: Charles M. North, Baylor University, Charles_North <at> baylor.edu

The Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture exists to promote interdisciplinary scholarship on religion through conferences, workshops, newsletters, websites, working papers, teaching, and research. ASREC supports all manner of social-scientific methods, but seeks especially to stimulate work based on economic perspectives and the rational choice paradigm.