Letter from the Editors (Spring 2024)

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 30, Number 1 (Spring 2024)

Letter from the Editors (Spring 2024)

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

Dear Friends,

As winter turns to spring, we at the CCHQ are thrilled to bring you the first installment of our 2024 newsletter. I want to start by thanking editor Sarah Thieme for her time on our editorial board, and to wish her all the best as she steps down from duties to the CCHQ and engages in new professional challenges.

Pope Pius XII, in a September 1945 audience. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Infallible_(Pope_Pius_XII)_%E2%80%93_Sept._1945.jpg

In this issue we have a conference report from Martin R. Menke from the American Historical Association’s annual meeting, in January. Martin was a panelist on the roundtable that featured a critical exchange of views about David Kertzer’s recent monograph The Pope at War, about the pontificate of Pius XII during the Second World War using documentation from the recently-opened Vatican archive. Kyle Jantzen provides a thoughtful chapter note about Susannah Heschel’s 2022 chapter, “Sacrament Versus Racism: Converted Jews in Nazi Germany,” which appeared in On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence, edited by Irene Kacandes. Recent doctoral graduate Rob Thompson has shared a research note on his dissertation, successfully defended late last year, on Christian relief workers in post-war Germany and their encounters with Holocaust survivors. Finally, I have translated a report from a September 2023 conference held in Hamburg, Germany, about historiographical research on attitudes (in relation to but not synonymous with mindsets, or mentalities) vis-à-vis Nazism during the Third Reich.

Looking ahead, I am excited that the next several issues are taking shape; they will feature a dynamic array of book and film reviews as well as chapter and research notes as well as relevant conference reports.

On behalf of my associate editors and the editorial board,

Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

Kindly note: the editorial board of the CCHQ reserves the right to consider requests for translations of articles by contributors. Please direct your request to Lauren Faulkner Rossi at lnf@sfu.ca.

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