Letter from the Editors (September 2018)

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 24, Number 3 (September 2018)

Letter from the Editors (September 2018)

By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University

Dear Friends,

As summer turns to autumn, and universities begin a new year, the editors of Contemporary Church History Quarterly are pleased to publish a new issue of articles, reviews, and other notes related to the history of religion in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Germany and Europe.

In this issue, we offer new insights into familiar figures, but also consider ways in which religion impacts more recent events. For instance, we are pleased to reprint a thoughtful interview from Bearings Online, a publication of the Collegeville Institute, with Bonhoeffer scholar (and CCHQ editor) Victoria Barnett, who reflects on the publication of Bonhoeffer’s After Ten Years and its import for today. As well, Heath Spencer reviews a new book on the mixed relationship between the right-wing political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) and religion.

Ludwig Isenbeck’s sculpture “Christus segnet die Gemeinde,” c. 1930, on the main facade of the Jesus Christus Kirche, Berlin Dahlem.
Source: Axel Mauruszat, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4574323

Also this quarter, Victoria Barnett contributes two reviews. The first is the biography of Reformed pastor Wilhelm Wibbeling of Hesse, a left-learning First World War veteran who pastored churches in socialist communities during and beyond the Third Reich. The second is on an updated version of Katrin Rudolph’s research on Franz Kaufmann, the key figure in a resistance circle in Martin Niemöller’s Dahlem Parish. Kaufmann and others produced forged documents for Jews, helping them survive in Nazi Berlin, until Kaufmann and others were arrested in 1943 (and, in Kaufmann’s case, murdered in Sachsenhausen in 1944).

We round out this latest issue of CCHQ with a review of a new volume of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s sermons, and a note about a recent article on the complicated nature (and legacy) of Orthodox missions in Nazi-occupied Russia.

We hope you enjoy this issue of Contemporary Church History Quarterly. If you know of books or articles you think we should review, or conferences that our readers should know about, please feel free to write to me at kjantzen@ambrose.edu.

On behalf of the editors,

Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University