Letter from the Editors (June 2019)
Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 25, Number 2 (June 2019)
Letter from the Editors (June 2019)
By Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University
Dear Friends,
It gives me great pleasure to present the newest issue of reviews and notes related to contemporary German and European religious history. In this 25th year of Contemporary Church History Quarterly (dating back to the late John Conway’s ACCH newsletter), we are happy to continue to serve academics and interested lay readers with commentary on the latest scholarship in the field. As I mentioned in my last letter from the editors, the issues and events our editors and guest contributors write about remain relevant in our current age of turmoil over identity, exclusion, and the role of religion in politics and society.
This month marks two changes to the CCHQ editorial team. First, we would like to offer our thanks and best wishes to Dr. Steven Schroeder of the University of the Fraser Valley, who is concluding his time as a member of the editorial team, on which he has served since 2010. Second, we would like to welcome Dr. Rebecca Carter-Chand to the editorial team. Dr. Carter-Chand works in the Programs on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto in 2016, with a dissertation entitled “Doing good in bad times: The Salvation Army in Germany, 1886-1946,” and brings to the journal her expertise in free churches and sects in twentieth-century Germany.
The Fulda Cathedral, home of the German Bishops’ Conference. Photo courtesy Florian K at Wikimedia Commons.
This issue of the journal features three reviews relating to Roman Catholicism in Nazi Germany. Lauren Faulkner Rossi reviews Maria Anna Zumholz and Michael Hirschfeld’s substantial edited volume on German Catholic bishops, Zwischen Seelsorge und Politik: Katholische Bischöfe in der NS-Zeit, while Kevin P. Spicer reviews both Thomas Brodie’s German Catholicism at War, 1939-1945 and Michael E. O’Sullivan’s Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1945.
Alongside these entries, Andrew Chandler reviews Ian M. Randall’s study of a little-known group, A Christian Peace Experiment: The Bruderhof Community in Britain, 1933-1942, while various notes consider recent articles by Heath Spencer and David A.R. Clark, a book chapter by Manfred Gailus, and an interesting collection of online sources on “American Christians’ responses to events in Europe in the 1930s and 40s and the ways in which many Americans viewed the rise of Nazism, World War II, and news of the Holocaust through the lens of their Christian identity.”
We hope you find these reviews and notes interesting and enlightening, and wish you an enjoyable summer season.
On behalf of the editorial team,
Kyle Jantzen, Ambrose University
