Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 32, Number 1 (Spring 2026)
Letter from the Editors (Spring 2026)
By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University
Dear Friends,
I will begin with warm Easter and Pesach greetings to those of you still in the throes of the high holidays of the many religious communities for whom this is a special, sacred time of year. Our March issue is posting, once again, several weeks later than it should, but it permits me to extend wishes for peace and moments of quiet tranquility for each of you as our world continues to spin quite a bit more erratically than it used to.
By ClemensAugust1700 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20898734
I am excited to begin our first issue of the 2026 calendar year with a full complement of reviews, and anticipate that all of our 2026 issues will follow with similar full-to-the-brim content. For this issue, Continue reading
Researchers and readers new to the topic will appreciate Bürger’s two introductory chapters, in which he situates the volume within the regime’s broader campaign against religious institutions. Repressive measures included the currency and morality trials, the closure of schools and novitiates, and the compulsory use of church properties during World War II. 
Co-editor Martin Keßler provides more detail on the concept in his individual contribution. Following Karl Mannheim, Max Weber, and most recently Dieter Henrich, the term “constellation” is to be understood as 
This, however, is exactly what Brandon Bloch presents in his book on Protestant Germany, a sweeping project that is part political, theological, and intellectual history and part social analysis that reassesses Protestant viewpoints and influences in postwar Germany, interspersed with occasional biographical materials on Protestant clergy and theologians as well as Protestant intellectuals and politicians. Bloch traces the wave of religious nationalism that swept up German Protestant during Hitler’s dictatorship and how the defeat of Nazi Germany required a reorientation among German Protestants which, as he convincingly argues, was both a break with the past as well as a continuation of previous Protestant mentalities. 
This book – or booklet – is the third of five publications thus far in Cambridge’s series “Elements in Modern War.” These 
This monograph advances several well-articulated claims. Its primary focus is to show that “even though Christian writers portrayed their engagement with each other as an egalitarian process, ecumenism was also deeply rooted in efforts to preserve hierarchies” (4). This study sheds light not only on the degree of interconfessional conflict and cooperation, but also on how opposition to class equality, feminism, and independence of African and Asian colonies prompted increasing ecumenical outreach. An additional thesis is that the rise of Nazism catalyzed change in confessional outlooks and caused an earlier shift toward cooperation between Catholics and Protestants than some previous histories of the subject suggest. 
Against the backdrop of rampant right-wing extremism in Saxony, it is all the more surprising that the government of Saxony does not wanted to provide any money to renovate the remaining buildings of the Sachsenburg concentration camp for an on-site memorial.
The work under review is his revised dissertation, which the late Thomas Großbölting supervised before his untimely death. Like most German dissertations, it begins with a lengthy discussion of existing literature and investigatory approaches. The author asserts that the concordat of 1933 was one of a series of treaties negotiated between churches and the German state in the twentieth century. Generally, the concordat is not considered a Staatskirchenvertrag, as those concluded by the German government and the Protestant churches are. Most historians of the concordat consider it a diplomatic agreement between two sovereign entities.