Letter from the Editors (Spring 2025)
Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 31, Number 1 (Spring 2025)
Letter from the Editors (Spring 2025)
By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University
Dear Friends,
Since my last missive, many events have prompted me to remember lines from a Yeats poem that first impressed me decades ago, that suddenly have distressing significance: “turning and turning into the widening gyre the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” I gesture to not only the multiple and daily reorientations and whiplash attempts at change unleashed by the new administration in the United States, with widespread repercussions internationally; but also, and much closer to home intellectually, to the unexpected and devastating death of Thomas Großbölting, in a train accident in Germany last month. It is with uncharacteristic somberness that our year, and my letter, begins.
Dr. Thomas Großbölting
Two of our long-time editors who worked closely with Thomas Großbölting – who was himself a close friend of our journal, and who attended the 2013 conference in Vancouver, BC, that feted our founder, John S. Conway – have written Nachrufe that appear below. These tributes from Mark Ruff (originally written in German and delivered at a celebration of life, that he has translated into English) and Manfred Gailus (printed in the original German), are a fitting way to open our issue, to remember our colleague and friend.
To launch us into 2025, we bring you several reviews and an article that appeared in Der Tagesspiegel. Martin Menke examines Alexander Lamprecht’s revised and published Master’s thesis about Catholic clergy in South Tyrol, revealing an oft-overlooked peripheral region caught between Italian fascism and German Nazism. Martina Cucchiara delves into the biography of Benedicta von Spiegel, head of the Benedictine abbey of St. Walburg in Eichstätt for over a quarter of a century, until she died in 1950. Dirk Schuster offers two reviews: one of the film Zwischen uns Gott, a provocative Austrian documentary released last year that immerses itself in the paradoxes of contemporary religion; and the second of Andreas Pangritz’s slender 2023 volume that explores theological – that is to say, Christian – roots of antisemitism. This review dovetails nicely with Manfred Gailus’s contribution from Der Tagesspiegel, in which he grapples with the evolution of Christian (Protestant) antisemitism in Germany in the twentieth century.
We have also uploaded a formal list of submission guidelines on our website, meant to clarify the scope and formatting of submissions for potential reviewers.
I invite you, 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.
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.
