William H. Swatos, Jr.

Abstract

William H. (Bill) Swatos, Jr. passed away at the Community General Hospital Medical Center in Sterling, Illinois. He was 74 years old. The immediate cause of death was complications from COVID-19.Bill Swatos is familiar to readers of Nova Religio because of his work on the sociology of religion, and especially from his co-edited anthology on prophecy in new religious movements, How Prophecy Lives, with Diana G. Tumminia (2011). He was the first executive director of the Religious Research Association, an organization that he served in that capacity from 1994 to 2015. Overlapping that service were his efforts as executive officer of the Association for the Sociology of Religion (ASR) from 1996 until 2012. In these jobs, Bill handled a myriad of organizational duties. Few models preceded him in this work, and few then or now could exceed his standards for timeliness and efficiency.Professor Swatos received his bachelor’s degree in sociology with honors in 1966 from Transylvania University in Kentucky, and his M.A. (1969) and Ph.D. (1973) in the same subject from the University of Kentucky. Across five decades, often as a visiting professor, he taught sociology, philosophy, and religious studies — along with occasional courses in anthropology, geography, and speech — at a succession of institutions in Florida, Tennessee, and Illinois. In 1982, Bill received a Fulbright grant to perform research and to lecture on religion in Iceland.In addition to administering professional affairs through his management of scholarly associations, Bill Swatos’s working life combined three other simultaneous yet distinct careers: research and writing on the sociology of religion with a noticeable Weberian bent; shepherding sociological articles and books by others into print as an academic editor; and serving Christian believers as a member of the ordained ministry.In the first pursuit, Bill Swatos authored or co-authored eight books, compiled twenty-one anthologies alone or in collaborations, and contributed more than seventy articles and chapters to religious or sociological publishers. He was always careful in his edited volumes not only to feature the work of established figures, but also to encourage and cultivate the participation of rising younger scholars. As an editor, Bill helmed the official journal of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, Sociology of Religion (formerly Sociological Analysis), between 1989 and 1994. After relinquishing that post, he revived and edited for a decade (2005-2015) Religion and the Social Order, the ASR’s long-running book series with Brill Academic Publishers. At the same time, he was managing editor (2004-2016) of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion, a pioneering online outlet sponsored by the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University.At the start of his ecclesiastical career, Bill graduated with an M.Div. degree in 1969 from the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Lexington, Kentucky, where he taught classes on Greek and the New Testament. The following year he was ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church and began serving a series of congregations of that denomination. His unit of the Episcopal Church in Illinois, the Diocese of Quincy, in 2008 withdrew in reaction to perceived departures from theological orthodoxy. Bill went with it, and with it he eventually affiliated with the new Anglican Church in North America. With the Anglicans he took charge of historic Christ Church, Limestone, in Hanna City, Illinois, for a decade.Much of what Bill Swatos achieved in life he did behind the scenes, in undertakings that would be noticed only if they were fumbled. Because such mishaps were rare, he risked missing the fullness of credit for all that he accomplished. This is an attempt to suggest why — among scholars, academic readers, conference-goers, and people in the pews — he will be greatly missed.