Attending: 38 persons
Meeting Convened: 5:05 p.m.
1. President's Remarks. President Charles Lippy offered a series of thanks: to the President-Elect and Program Committee Chair, Richard Heitzenrater, for organizing the program; to Baylor University for its support for the administrative work of the ASCH; to the Executive Secretary, Keith Francis, and his assistants, Elizabeth Wilson and Daniel Hoover. Lippy noted that two members of the ASCH received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and that he had made contact at the ACLS, meeting with an organization for independent scholars that has modest travel support available for such scholars.
2. Executive Secretary's Report. Keith Francis commented on the status of the Society's new website and stated that it will be fully functional at the beginning of May. Francis noted that, despite some difficulties, the ASCH office move, from Yale Divinity School to Baylor University, had been reasonably smooth.
3. Church History Editors' Report. John Corrigan thanked all those who had served as peer reviewers and who had written book reviews in the last year. He noted that the transition to Cambridge University Press as the publisher of the journal had gone well. For example, the editors received thirty-one article submissions from outside the United States in 2009, and institutional subscriptions were doing well, suggesting that Church History's distribution had broadened. Further, there had been a record of electronic downloads of articles from Church History (the most of the latter was an article on Joseph Smith; in general, the most popular articles were downloaded more than a thousand times). Corrigan noted that the editors have continued their recent policy of including long articles in the journal.
4. Committee Reports.
A. Membership. Committee Chair Candy Brown pointed out that the drop in membership of 50 percent from 2008 was a loss of those members who had not paid their dues. (Such delinquent members were not removed from the membership database in previous years.) Brown noted the substantial number of delinquent members who lived outside the United States: the Society would need to address this problem. With regard to make-up of the Society, one-third of the Society's members are graduate students; having graduate students pay $25 for membership after two years of free membership should enable the Society to track whether these students are becoming full members of the Society. Last, Brown drew attention to the Council's creation of a new category of member, an honorary member. Honorary members are retired persons over the age of 65 who remain members of the Society but no longer receive Church History.
B. Nominations. Committee Chair Grant Wacker proposed the name of Barbara Newman, Professor of English, Religion, and Classics at Northwestern University, as the president-elect. VOTED: By acclamation. Wacker also presented the names of the Council Class of 2012: Anthea Butler, University of Pennsylvania; Anne Blue Wills, Davidson College; Andrew Jacobs, Scripps College; Jehu Hanciles, Fuller Theological Seminary; Bruce Hindmarsh, Regent College (Canada).
C. Research. Committee Chair Daniel Bornstein announced the names of the winners of the Society's prizes for 2009. Philip Schaff Prize: John Van Engen, University of Notre Dame, for Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize: William Inboden, Legatum Institute, for Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Sidney E. Mead Prize: David King, a Ph.D. candidate at Emory University, for his essay, “The West Looks East: The Influence of Toyohiko Kagawa on American Mainline Protestantism.” The Jane Dempsey Douglass Prize was not awarded. Van Engen was presented with the Schaff Prize by Bornstein and President Lippy. Bornstein noted that there had been twenty-four submissions for the Schaff Prize and only two submissions for the Douglass Prize; he encouraged members to nominate essays for the latter. Bornstein also drew attention to the new rules passed by the Council with regard to the prizes, particularly the fact that the winner of the Schaff and Outler prizes will receive $2,000 in the future.
D. Finance. Substituting for the chair Hans Hillebrand, the Executive Secretary stressed the need for the Society to develop a financial plan. Francis also answered a question about the loan of $50,000 which the Society had taken from its Schwab account: this matter would be addressed by the ad-hoc financial planning committee (whose members will be chosen by the new president, Richard Heitzenrater). Peter Williams moved, Steve Marini seconded the motion to accept the budget for 2010. VOTED: By acclamation.
E. Program Committee. Committee Chair Richard Heitzenrater noted that this had been a good year for paper submissions—more than fifty were not included in the program. Heitzenrater appealed to members to submit their papers and sessions for next year's meeting early in order to facilitate the work of the new program committee chair.
5. Other Business. President Lippy asked past presidents of the Society to stand and be recognized. Seven were present.
6. In Memoriam. Robert Handy, a recipient of the Distinguished Career Award and a past ASCH President, and Thomas Schafer, of Nashville, Tennessee, were mentioned as having died in the past year.
Meeting Adjourned: 5:50 p.m.
