Letter from the Editors (Winter 2024)
Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 30, Number 4 (Winter 2024)
Letter from the Editors (Winter 2024)
By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University
Dear Friends,
Very warm Christmas greetings to our readers! Once again I bring our issue to post a bit later than intended, but I hope that the very full content makes up for the tardiness. As my first year as managing editor comes to a close, I am quietly very pleased that our journal can end on such a strong note, with a variety of contributions for December and the promise that 2025 and beyond will feature similar breadth, depth, and quality scholarship from our editorial board.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer with his students. By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R0211-316 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5436013.
This issue features a variety of reviews, including five book reviews and a film review, as well as an article note and two conference reports: one concerning a seminar on religion and secularism in nineteenth-century Germany from the September 2023 German Studies Association meeting; the other detailing the joint meeting of editorial boards for Contemporary Church History Quarterly and Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte in Washington, DC, in October. This conference report was written collaboratively by the editors in attendance and features brief summaries of all papers presented, to give our readers an idea of the ongoing commitment to and relevance of church/Church history and related fields on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and in multiple languages. It was a fruitful and all-too-brief opportunity for our board to meet in person, and for the executive committee to welcome several of our newest editors; we are hopeful that such meetings will occur with more frequency, or at least more regularity, in the coming years.
Martina Cucchiara has written a detailed analysis of David Kertzer’s The Pope at War, one of the most recent contributions (and there is sure to be more) to the scholarly debates about the activities of Pope Pius XII during the Holocaust using the recently-opened wartime archives of his papacy. In his review of a related work, Gerald Steinacher takes on the edited volume of Marshall J. Breger and Hubert R. Reginbogin, The Vatican and Permanent Neutrality, with essays that explore the concept of neutrality and its ability to explain Vatican diplomacy over a century of history. Andrew Chandler offers a comment on Keith Clements’ study of two ecumenical pioneers and their role in Christian internationalism in the twentieth century in J.H. Oldham and George Bell: Ecumenical Pioneers. Jonathan Huener examines William Skiles’ study, Preaching to Nazi Germany, of the responses of Confessing Church clergy to National Socialism to explain their failure to mount stiffer opposition to its ideology. In an article note, Kyle Jantzen comments on Harry Legg’s exploration of instances of Jewish self-discovery in pre-WWII Europe, published in Contemporary European History this past fall.
A pair of reviews intersect in prominent and provocative ways in taking on new material about a much-studied and popular subject in the annals of German church history, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Christopher Probst’s film review of Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Assassin (2024), is a sensitive and careful reflection of what the film does well in addition to identifying some serious flaws. (The film attracted significant media attention both in Germany as well as in the United States because of its use – and misuse – in Christian nationalist propaganda.) Connected to this, our own editor-emerita Victoria Barnett writes a detailed review of Tim Lorentzen’s most recent study, Bonhoeffers Widerstand im Gedächtnis der Nachwelt, which considers Bonhoeffer’s role in the resistance to Nazism and how the legacy and memory of this has shifted over time.
As ever, I invite you, as the reader, to let us know what you think by leaving a comment on our site, and to relate any major conferences, exhibitions, websites, or films that we should know about to review, by contacting me directly at lnf@sfu.ca.
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.
