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About "Simulating Sects"I presented this at the October, 2004 annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. I sent it out for publication, but was turned down -- largely because the article did not provide enough details about the program's underlying algorithms and because it did not engage enough aspects of Stark et. al's theory. The reviewers provided many helpful and cogent suggestions, but basically asked for a different article than the one that I had written. As usual, the reviewers were right! (Among other things, they pointed out that I seem as interested in the software as I am in the critique that it allows of Stark et. al's approach to religious life. On reflection, I realized that this is true -- and that such interest does not have much place in journals such as the one to which I submitted my work. ) The review process took over 8 months. By the time it was finished, I had moved on to other projects and had no to write a new article. Recently, I was able to publish the original piece with modifications in a Festschrift for my Norwegian colleague Pål Repstad (Pp 131-152 in Religion in Late Modernity: Essays in Honor of Pål Repstad, edited by Inger Furseth and Paul Leer-Salveson. Trondheim: Tapir Academic Press, 2007) I decided to leave this posting at Cool Sociology because the Festschrift could not reproduce screenshot colors and because it's hard to download software from a book. As the reviewers noted, I am interested in people using the software, which is capable of testing much more than just the theory that I used it to evaluate. I may ultimately write a different article along the lines that the reviewers suggested -- and I thank them for pointing me in a fruitful direction. -- Jim Spickard
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