The years ahead in scholarship

In the FORUM of the Winter 1993 issue (volume 3, no. 1), the editors asked George Marsden, Colleen McDannell, David Wills, and Robert Orsi to speculate about "The Decade Ahead in Scholarship." That decade now having passed, readers might wish to return to those four sets of observations to see how much of what the contributors thought lay ahead in the study of the American religious territories has, in fact, drawn exploration, how fully their senses of the important directions to be taken have now been followed out, or how completely their surmises about the key questions to be posed and answered have, in fact, come in for satisfactory response. Without at all supposing that the scholarship in the field falls neatly into decade-long periods, we nevertheless thought that this "anniversary" would provide an interesting occasion to raise a comparable set of questions to put to a different set of scholars, and, thus, we asked the current contributors - without necessarily referring to that earlier FORUM - to present their observations regarding the upcoming years in scholarship on American religion and culture. Well known for their own distinctive work, they seemed to the editors poised to think about important trajectories for the scholarship to follow, approaches that need development to grapple with significant issues, neglected areas or styles or patterns potentially fruitful for critical inquiry, and the like as students of American religious life reckon with their subject in the near future.