ABSTRACT
What could go wrong? With such an ambitious agenda as ours, surely pitfalls lurked. Indeed, we did occasionally stumble, though seldom disastrously, and often the result was comic relief. We can report that the ability to laugh at and with each other should be a precondition of any long-term collaborative project. Our shortcomings are important to address. For instance, as much as the project was designed to help us get beyond our parochial habits, especially conceptual ones, we stand humbled by our limitations to do so. Even on ground central to our project, such as understandings of our core terms, we have continued to talk past each other at times. This is a sobering lesson about the difficulties of effecting real change, for if a devoted group of scholars who work together over years sometimes fail to communicate clearly and persuasively with one another, what hope might we reasonably have for less intensive forms of intellectual engagement?
