Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 32, Number 1 (Spring 2026)

Letter from the Editors (Spring 2026)

By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University

Dear Friends,

I will begin with warm Easter and Pesach greetings to those of you still in the throes of the high holidays of the many religious communities for whom this is a special, sacred time of year. Our March issue is posting, once again, several weeks later than it should, but it permits me to extend wishes for peace and moments of quiet tranquility for each of you as our world continues to spin quite a bit more erratically than it used to.

By ClemensAugust1700 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20898734

I am excited to begin our first issue of the 2026 calendar year with a full complement of reviews, and anticipate that all of our 2026 issues will follow with similar full-to-the-brim content. For this issue, Martina Cucchiara reviews the third in a projected four-volume series devoted to the analysis of the Klostersturm, or “storming of the cloisters”, when eight Catholic cloisters in the archdiocese of Paderborn were shut down by the Gestapo between 1939 and 1941. She notes the dense volume’s dedication to source-based inquiry (one of its lengthy sections is composed of primary documents, including testimony) and resolve in posing difficult questions. Manfred Gailus examines in detail a similarly hefty edited volume covering German Protestantism in the twentieth century using the novel principle of “constellation research.” He is less impressed with his subject, in part due to the book’s lofty aspirations and in part due to his skepticism about the central theoretical conceit involving constellations. (Both of these books are available in German only.)

Bjorn Krondorfer takes on Brandon Bloch’s recent publication about Protestant Germany in the wake of the Nazi period, acknowledging that Bloch’s attention to detail and stimulating insights make the book well worth the read. Blake McKinney turns his attention to Patrich Houlihan’s latest book, about humanitarian action during the period of the great wars, praising it as an unexpected and welcome contribution that highlights the preservation of lives and reconstruction of societies rather than the immense destruction of international conflict. Michael O’Sullivan’s examination of Udi Greenberg’s text on the end of schism between Catholics and Protestants in post-war Europe is also laudatory, though he is careful to engage Greenberg in conversation with several other scholars who have worked in the same or adjacent fields and come to different conclusions. Finally, Dirk Schuster provides a brief article note about David Kertzer’s foray into modern Irish history, to examine Irish episcopal responses to pleas for help from Jews and recent converts to Catholicism in fascist Italy after the passage of Italian racial laws.

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