Author Archives: Björn Krondorfer

Review of Mirjam Loos, Gefährliche Metaphern: Auseinandersetzungen deutscher Protestanten mit Kommunismus und Bolschewismus (1919 bis 1955)

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer 2025)

Review of Mirjam Loos, Gefährliche Metaphern: Auseinandersetzungen deutscher Protestanten mit Kommunismus und Bolschewismus (1919 bis 1955). (Göttingen: Verlag Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), pp. 266

By Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University

There are many studies about the role of Protestant churches and theology during the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, including examinations of the Kirchenkampf, the so-called Judenfrage, antisemitism, or complicity with or resistance to National Socialist ideology. So far, however, no systematic assessment has been written about anti-communist and anti-Bolshevist sentiments in German Protestantism during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. “In the historiography of Protestantism,” Mirjam Loos writes, “a detailed analysis of the anti-Bolshevist rhetoric [Sprach- und Denkmuster]” is still missing (17). Her book, Dangerous Metaphors, is filling this gap.

Based on her 2017 dissertation in Protestant theology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Loos presents a meticulously researched, insightful, and densely written work on German Protestant attitudes toward communism in general (ideas, ideologies, organizations) and Soviet communist-Bolshevism in particular. Occasionally referencing pre-World War I events, her focus is Germany’s political transition through the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, tracing the intensification of anti-communist rhetoric on the eve of World War II and the eventual military assault on the Soviet Union in 1941. While the opening chapter points to a few academic-theological debates at the turn of the century on possible family resemblances between the ideals of early Christian and communist communities, the last chapter briefly outlines post-war developments in the Protestant churches until the mid-1950s, with anti-communist stances, though more restrained, remaining largely intact.

Her study might be best described as a historical as well as discourse-critical approach to analyzing how metaphors calling out the evils of communism and Bolshevism operated within a Protestant milieu. Her sources are not limited to academic writings by German theologians or public statements by the Landeskirchen (regional churches). Rather, as Loos puts it, it is a study of processes in the “evangelische Kommunikationsraum,” perhaps best translated as ‘general communication patterns in the German Protestant milieu.’ This Kommunikationsraum includes specific social spaces, organizations, official actors, media, and mechanisms of distribution. Her study thus examines a variety of sources, including sermons, theological journals, educational materials, encyclopedias, official church statements, travel diaries, testimonies, and surveys to stitch together a rich tapestry of the steadily intensifying anti-communist/anti-Bolshevist and, at times, “Bolshevist-Jewish” conspiratorial rhetoric in Protestant milieus. This rhetoric, increasingly divorced from any political reality and analysis, functioned more like a device to first conjure and then combat demonic forces—to a point, as Loos states, that “can only be described as psychotic” (208). The trope in particular of Kulturbolschewismus—an ill-defined, all-encompassing term to assert that Bolshevist ideology has infiltrated every part of German culture and society—eventually established a common ground between German Protestants and Nazi ideology.

The revolutionary events of November 1918 and spring 1919 are the actual starting point of the book’s loosely chronological approach to analyzing Protestant reactions to the threat of communism. Loos focuses on the upheavals during the short-lived “Münchener Räterepublik” and also on violent events in the Latvian capital of Riga. In the latter case, Bolshevist forces murdered Baltic German pastors who, in Christian discourse, were swiftly turned into martyrs. In response to the perceived communist threat, religious leaders (including Baltic German pastors returning from the Gulag) sounded the alarm with first-person accounts, pamphlets, and articles, while paramilitary forces, like the Free Corps (which included pastors and students of theology), fought mercilessly against rebellious workers (Revolutionäre Arbeiterräte). Those events launched the rhetorical patterns of fear that persisted for the coming decades: Bolshevism came to stand in as a general cipher for an attack on religion, Christianity, Germany, and civilization. While at the turn of the century, according to Loos, Protestants mainly took a skeptical stance toward what they called the utopia of communist social ideals, following the violent 1918/1919 events, the ambivalence of German Protestants toward the Weimar Republic increased, blaming Moscow for instigating discord in Germany (like Munich’s Räterepublik) and accusing it for violently repressing Christians in the Soviet Union.

In the following two chapters, Loos examines Protestant responses in the years 1930 to 1932, before Hitler seized power. She mentions the continuing multiplicity of voices in Protestant milieus during those years. On the one hand, there were efforts of solidarity with the persecuted brethren in Russia and protests against the treatment of Christians in the Soviet Union (exemplified by an analysis of official statements coming out of the 1930 Deutsche Evangelische Kirchentag in Nuremberg); on the other hand, German pastors such as the group of “religious socialists,” to which Paul Tillich belonged, were still able to openly identify with socialism and the “proletariat.” Clergy and theologians could still associate with the Social Democratic Party, and special clerical positions were created for a “Proletarierpfarrer” (pastoral care for the working class). Discussions were still nuanced. For example, official church statements condemned religious persecution in the Soviet Union but refrained from demonizing the Soviet social experiment in general. And there were intense internal as well as public debates on the communist memberships of German pastor Erwin Eckert and theologian Fritz Lieb. In the end both were removed from their positions, in the church and at the university respectively. All the while, other voices, today mostly forgotten, pushed a strong anti-Soviet agenda into Protestant Kommunikationsräume. For example, the Baltic German pastor Oskar Schabert condemned with apocalyptic and sexist imagery the anti-church and anti-Christian agenda of Bolshevism: “Satan herrschte, und sein willigstes Werkzeug waren die entmenschten ‚Flintenweiber’, meist junge Dirnen, denen Morden Wollust [war]” (94).* There are also the polemic publications of Iwan Iljin, who had been expelled from Moscow and whose anti-Soviet publications, such as “Gift, Geist und Wesen des Bolschewismus” (Poison, Spirit, and Essence of Bolshevism), reached a wide readership in Protestant milieus. Loos also looks at the travel reports of the few Protestants who had dared to journey to the Soviet Union during those years, like Rudolf Mirbt, who afterward concluded that the Protestant church had to play a decisive role in the final battle (Entscheidungskampf) against Bolshevism.

In chapter 5, Loos examines how the anti-Bolshevist attitudes, which had become a cohesive, identity-building force within Protestantism, enabled the churches to find common ground with Nazism and its anti-Soviet propaganda. The chapter starts with tracing the neologism of Kulturbolschewismus (cultural infiltration of Bolshevism) in 1931 and moves forward to the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. It is a historically and conceptually rich chapter, and any short summary here will not do it justice. But let me say this: important to note is the author’s analysis of the ill-defined yet all-encompassing term Kulturbolschewismus, which became a “cipher for everything ‘evil,’ completely detached from any political ascriptions” (145). At times, this term morphed into the antisemitic trope of “Judeo-Bolshevism.” Loos seems to suggest that the idea of Judeo-Bolshevism, though not absent in Protestant publications, was far more prevalent in Nazi ideology than in Protestant rhetoric. And yet, it is always appalling to realize how leaders of the various regional churches succumbed and conformed to Hitler’s war. For example, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, church leaders, including bishop August Marahrens (Hannover), sent a telegram to Adolf Hitler pledging their support and solidarity: “You have, my Führer, contained the Bolshevist danger in our country and now call on our Volk [people] and all the people in Europe to go into a decisive battle against the mortal enemy of all Ordnung [discipline/rule-based/divinely-willed order] and of the whole occidental-Christian culture” (167). The chapter ends with an apt summary: “In view of the 1936 Spanish Civil War and the attack of the Soviet Union in 1941, various church committees confirmed their loyalty to Hitler and the National-Socialist state” (179).

In the concluding chapter, Loos returns to a conceptual discussion of the role of metaphors regarding anti-Bolshevist rhetoric in Protestant spaces, and how the imagery of nature, meteorology, war, and victimhood morphed into suggestions of a final apocalyptic battle between Christianity and Bolshevism, in which the Soviet Union stood for chaos and darkness and Nazi Germany for light and order. Moving into the post-war period, Loos indicates that anti-Bolshevist sentiments remained intact in Protestant church circles after 1945, especially in West Germany, now under U.S. military administration. Yet, she writes, divergent opinions began to emerge in the 1950s in West German Protestant circles regarding the assessment of danger emanating from the Soviet Union, especially when the question of German rearmament was widely and controversially debated at the onset of the Cold War.

The book ends with a quote from theologian Helmut Gollwitzer, who had been a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union. After the war, Gollwitzer argued for a more differentiated view of communism, suggesting that communism is not “satanic,” though it might be a flawed idea. Coming full circle, Loos writes, we need to know that Gollwitzer had once been a student of Fritz Lieb, the socialist-leaning theologian who had been removed from his university position in 1933.

Notes:

* “Satan ruled, and his most willing tools were the dehumanized ‘gun-toting women’, mostly young prostitutes for whom murder was a source of pleasure.” (Editor’s translation)

Review of Jeremy Best, Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture in the Age of Empire

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 28, Number 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2022)

Review of Jeremy Best, Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture in the Age of Empire (University of Toronto Press, 2021). Pp. 322. ISBN: 9781487505639.

By Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University

Questions around the legacy of German colonialism and how its racist ideologies and genocidal campaigns against the Maji-Maji in German East Africa (1905-1908) and the Herero in German Southwest Africa (1904-1908) influenced Nazi exterminationalist policies in World War II and the Holocaust have been debated in scholarship and public discourse for a good two decades. In the same decades, public awareness of the persistence of reflexive, uncaring repetitions of colonial patterns in postcolonial nations has steadily grown, not at least because of recent protests against vestiges of colonialism that led, to name just two examples, to the repatriation of stolen cultural artifacts from European museums and the removal of public monuments in countries like Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. The presumption that Christian missionary activities were deeply embedded in the colonial enterprise, working in tandem with secular colonialist rulers, sounds like a truism today. And yet, Jeremy Best’s new book on German missionary culture questions a facile alignment of colonial economic exploitation (by secular nations states) with missionary ambitions to win souls for Christ.

Best, a historian at Iowa State University, pleads for a careful analysis of historical documentation related to German Protestant missionary activities in the nineteenth century within the context of German religious and political culture. His study of “the vast corpus of texts produced by the German missionary movement…between 1860 and the First World War” (7) arrives at the insight that relations between Protestant missionaries and German secular colonial elites were tense and fractured. They did not see eye-to-eye with regards to the purpose of establishing colonies in Africa. German Protestant missionaries aimed for a global Christian community in which the indigenous population (the colonized subject) was given some agency. They recognized the value of indigenous subjectivity that, in their imagination, would blossom economically on local levels, thus protecting them from becoming objects of brutal exploitation in the interest of European nation states, including the late colonial aspirations of the Wilhelmine Empire. What indigenous Africans were missing, according to German Protestant missionaries, was education, and that meant, of course, Christian education.

Following in the footsteps of text-centered Lutheran traditions—even if not all German missionaries were Lutherans—it may not surprise that education, learning, and reading were centerpieces for German missionary activities. They included bringing the word of God to “heathens,” translating the Bible into indigenous languages, publishing multiple mission journals, and creating the new academic discipline of Missionswissenschaft. Hence, with a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the Gospel of John, Heavenly Fatherland opens with the following lines: “In the beginning were words. Words said, words written, words read by German Protestants seeking knowledge of God, knowledge of the world, and knowledge of other people” (5). From the very first page, the reader gets prepared for an exploration of a German Sonderweg of missionary activities, a path distinct from mission aims of other colonial empires like Britain or Spain, but also distinct from German Catholic activities in German Southwest and East Africa.

The author presents his arguments in six chapters. Though he is mostly focusing on German East Africa (surrounded by British, Belgian, and Portuguese colonial territories) and on the work of the Berlin Mission, his perspective is always directed at the larger political picture. The book brings together, Best states, “religious history [and] the history of German colonialism” (18). Seamlessly woven into his overall thesis are materials from other mission societies and Hilfsvereine at home as well as larger political tensions and competitions between various actors (between European colonialists; Protestant missionaries and German colonial elites; German national politics and Protestant dreams of a global “heavenly fatherland”; German Protestants and their anti-Catholic crusade during the Kulturkampf).

Chapter 1 focuses on the development of German Protestant mission ideals that pursued not national interests but the preaching of the Gospel. Important figures like Gustav Warneck and Carl Mirbt advocated for the Gospel of Mark’s Great Commission: mission work should not create “Germans” among colonized people, but “Christians” among “heathens.” These men followed an international vision with “economically self-sufficient…colonized communities” (45) in Africa as well as aspirations for a worldwide Christian mission network. At the turn of the century and before the outbreak of World War I, a younger generation of mission leaders, like Karl Axenfeld and Julius Richter, followed, however, a new direction, pushing more forcefully to align Christian mission work with the German nation.

Chapter 2 pays attention to the importance of language and education that Protestant Germans ascribed to regarding their missionary ideals. Rather than replacing native languages and culture with those of the colonizer, Gustav Warneck understood that “Christianity [as] a foreign religion can only become indigenous…if they grasp it in their mother tongue” (68). To some extent, Warneck and others wanted a less-intrusive cultural exchange, respecting indigenous languages while organizing the newly found African-Christian communities as Volkskirchen—this very German idea that a particular church community is constituted by a particular Volk (a people/ethnos/ nationality/race). What Warneck and others did not grasp—according to Best—is that their professed global outlook nevertheless implanted particular national concepts in Africa, and thus inadvertently participated in the national colonial enterprise they resisted.

Chapter 3 examines tensions between missionary aspirations and secular state interests regarding the indigenous work force. While the state wanted cheap labor (and at best allowed for something like trade schools), the theology of missionaries aimed for a broader education to create communities for African Christians, in opposition to demands for producing “a proletariat toiling for European colonialists” (111). Chapter 4 provides a gripping analysis of the clash between three parties: secular, national imperialists focused on exploiting indigenous peoples and lands, Protestant missionaries wanting to create local indigenous Volkskirchen as Christian agrarian communities, and Catholic missionaries somewhere in between (according to Protestant polemics, the Catholic Church “satisf[ied] the needs of trading companies [and] plantation owners”; 120). The chapter briefly reviews the history of anti-Catholic sentiments in Germany and how this conflict spilled over into the African continent, with the result of Protestants and Catholics jostling over land. To that end, missions, like the Berlin Mission, acquired land as protection zones from economic exploitation. This process was, of course, just another colonial “paternalistic plan” (127) of land appropriation—albeit in the form of benign paternalism with the goal of protecting Christian-African communities.

Chapters 5 and 6 return “home” to the European continent. While Chapter 5 shows the tremendous effort of Protestant missionaries to build up support networks in German localities through presentations, exhibits, testimonies by Christianized Africans, and publications, Chapter 6 introduces the reader to the Protestant efforts of creating international Christian mission networks. It focuses on the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh, where the German participants hoped, for good reasons, to take a leading role in future global mission outreach. Those dreams were shattered with World War I. By 1918, Germany did not only lose its colonies, it also lost its moral standing in international settings, and that included the churches. The rise of Hitler and eventually World War II and the Holocaust confirmed to the world that Germans could not be trusted.

Compared to other colonial empires (like British, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese), German colonial rule was short-lived. It lasted for about half a century. Whatever long-term dreams national-secular elites and Protestant missionaries followed when they expanded into African territories, they all came to an abrupt end after World War I. The question remains: Were German Protestant missionaries and their theologies entangled in a racist and colonial enterprise in Africa that may have laid the foundation for the rise of racist antisemitism and the eventual genocidal campaigns in Europe after 1939? Jeremy Best’s work provides evidence that this is not the case. Generally, he sees nineteenth century German colonial history having more “in common with its contemporaneous Western empires than it does with the Third Reich” (11). Specifically, he makes us aware of significant differences between the aims of German Protestant missionaries and national interests of secular colonialists. The former resisted colonialist economic exploitation.

Nowhere does Best claim that German missionaries were free of colonialist and racist thoughts and practices; only that they “imagined racial differences differently” (10). He concludes that they “rejected the most extreme elements of racism and imperialism” (217). Best has no interest in glorifying or morally elevating German missionaries. He is fully aware that he is approaching his study through the eyes of the documentation left behind by the missionaries themselves, not through the eyes of the indigenous African population, thus privileging a European perspective. Hence, a study like this, he writes, “cannot pretend to be the whole truth of German colonialism” (218).

Framed within an awareness of the limitations of his study on colonialism and missionary activities, this is an excellent book—motivating, perhaps, someone else to write a response based on historical documentation by the indigenous population of German East and Southwest Africa, however scarce. Even when assessing some of Best’s interpretations differently, Heavenly Fatherland is an important read.

If there is any flaw (on a more formal level), then we can point to a certain kind of repetitiveness related to the author’s main thesis and sub-theses. Too often do we find central insights repeated in slightly different wordings, holding back the flow of the text and the reader’s attention when we were already prepared to move onward.

Webinar Note: Christian Nationalism – A Conversation

Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 27, Number 2 (June 2021)

Webinar Note: Christian Nationalism – A Conversation

By Björn Krondorfer, Northern Arizona University

At the time of this writing, the 2021 Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville is battling for its soul: Should they adhere to their conservative interpretations of biblical values to fight back against the perceived evils of secular modernity? Or should they confirm a politicized evangelicalism that is deeply rooted in southern white culture and epitomized by a categorical support of Trumpism? Put differently, will southern Baptists continue to battle their century-old “culture wars” for the sake of individual salvation, or define themselves as fighting a “political war” for the soul of the nation?

While, for decades, scholars and observers have read the anti-modernist, anti-humanist, and scripturalist impulse of American Christianity as an expression of religious fundamentalism, the analytical (and popular) literature has recently shifted its discourse to speak about Christian nationalism: the idea that it is more important to defend a particular—and, no doubt, mythologized—version of America as a divinely-ordained nation than limiting one’s mission to the preaching of a biblical-ordained lifestyle. As Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry put it in their study, Taking America Back For God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (2020), “The ‘Christianity’ of Christian nationalism represents something more than religion, [such as] assumptions about nativism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, along with divine sanction for authoritarian control and militarism.”

Because of the relevance of this topic—and propelled by the insurrectionist violence we witnessed at the U.S. Capitol on January 6—the Martin-Springer Institute* put together a 4-part Zoom conversation series on Christian nationalism in April 2021. Titled Unholy Alliance: Nationalism and Christianity, the series took a comparative approach by bringing in voices from different national contexts: Victoria Barnett on “Protestants and Ethno-Nationalism in Nazi Germany”; Sarah Posner on “The Rise of Christian Nationalism Among American White Evangelicals”; Annamaria Orla-Bukowska on “Roman Catholicism, the Church, and Polishness in Contemporary Poland”; and Katya Tolstaya on “Post-Soviet Patriotism, Nationalism, and Russian Orthodoxy.”

Though the focus of the series was not to directly address the links between religiously inspired anti-democratic groups across different nations, it is important to note that such transatlantic networks exist between American ultra-conservative evangelicals and their Orthodox and Catholic counterparts in Eastern Europe. We could call this cooperation a new kind of ecumenical alliance that seeks common ground on anti-abortion, anti-LGTBQ, anti-woman health, and anti-democratic platforms; their leaders believe that strong, autocratically-ruled states will promote their religious values, such as in Putin’s Russia, Orban’s Hungary, and Poland’s Law and Justice party. In the U.S, the Institute for Cultural Conservatism or the World Congress of Families, founded and promoted by people like Paul Weyrich, William Lind, and Brian Brown, have embraced the authoritarian style of Putin and Orban as models for a renewed America.

Victoria Barnett, former director of the USHMM’s Program on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust, started the series with an analysis of the Protestant churches during the Third Reich, geared toward an audience of non-specialists. Given the historical proclivity of German Protestants to identify with a German nation-state, it was not surprising that many Germans—after the defeat in 1918 and the perceived national humiliation of the Versailles Treaty—had high hopes that Hitler would restore Germany to its rightful (and superior) place among nations. In 1933, when Hitler took power, there was little opposition by the churches, until the moment when some theologians and clergy began to fear the Nazi encroachment on church autonomy. Those familiar with this history would quickly recognize the distinctions Barnett drew between the three evolving movements: the Deutsche Christen (German Christians), the Confessing Church, and the patriotic middle (the so-called “intact churches”). The Deutsche Christen, Barnett explained, was a “Christian nationalist, pro-Nazi group within the German Protestant church.” Its “politically nationalistic, right-wing” supporters “developed an understanding of Protestantism that was strongly ethnicized.” They emphasized “the Germanic nature of their faith [and] affirmed much of the Nazi platform.” When asked about lessons learned for today, Barnett pointed to the failure of the church to find a strong oppositional voice to Nazism. She mentioned the tragedy of becoming bystanders—of what Bonhoeffer bemoaned as the “silent witnesses of evil deeds.” Her presentation can be viewed here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=msc6ZV4eT94&list=PLvTDA4SpA8Z408WLA4D68ZXlzrY3z5aM-

Our second speaker, Sarah Posner, author of Unholy Alliance: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump (2020), introduced our Zoom audience to the development of American fundamentalist evangelicals and their battles since the 1950s. She asked how a religious movement that presented itself originally as a defender of religion and family values turned into a political force. “The conceptualization of America as a Christian nation that is under threat by secularism,” she argued, “accelerated in the second half of the twentieth century.” She concluded by pointing out the danger of anti-democratic convictions among white evangelicals who deploy religion for their own political agendas. Given these developments, she cautioned that “complacency is not an option.” Her presentation can be viewed here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCUvl3EkoZU&list=PLvTDA4SpA8Z408WLA4D68ZXlzrY3z5aM-&index=2&t=3775s

“Out of the frying pan into the fire” (literally, “from the rain into the eaves”), this cartoon critically depicts Poland’s transition from communist to Catholic (state) ideology.

Anna Maria Orla-Bukoswka from Jagiellonian University in Krakow introduced our audience to the contemporary landscape of Polish Catholicism, with its split between, what she called, the “open and closed” church. Whereas the former promotes openness to dialogue with civil society and embraces diversity (including Catholic-Jewish relations), the closed church refers to the clerical hierarchy working in tandem with nationalist themes promoted by the Law and Justice party. Referencing the “founding myth of Polish history as the Chrzest polski, the Baptism of Poland in 966,” she presented a more complex history of the slow Christianization of Poland with its multicultural and ethnically diverse population. Only as a result of the Holocaust and the redrawing of borders after 1945 did Poland become a majority Catholic population, though religion remained repressed under Communism. “The entire modern Polish history,” she argued, “has taught Poles not to trust the State but the Church.” As a result, Roman Catholicism and Polish nationalism became entangled entities, which led to the current marriage between church and state authorities pursuing an illiberal agenda and discriminating against minority groups. Her presentation can be viewed here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=21V-gVCRkyc&list=PLvTDA4SpA8Z408WLA4D68ZXlzrY3z5aM-&index=3&t=18s

Katya Tolstaya, Professor of Religion and Theology in Post-Trauma Society at the Vrije University of Amsterdam, introduced current themes of nationalism and Russian Orthodoxy in post-Soviet Russia. Briefly delineating some key differences between Orthodoxy and Catholicism and Protestantism (such as the central role of icons and martyrs), she traced the alliance of Russian patriotism and Orthodoxy to Dostoyevsky who had stated that “to be Russian is to be Orthodox”—a phrase, according to Tolstaya, that is often quoted by extreme Russian nationalists today. Despite religious and ethnic diversity in post-Soviet society, “Orthodoxy has become the national church in Russia.” Orthodoxy is not only a powerful force shaping society but is also deployed to legitimate national expansion into other regions today, such as Ukraine. Tolstaya lamented the lack of transparency regarding suspected collaboration between the KGB and the church in the Soviet Union, the lack of a “civil society” in Russia today, and the participation of theologians in “operationalizing sacred liturgical texts” for xenophobic and nationalist purposes. Her presentation can be viewed here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYrDTHP9NWk&list=PLvTDA4SpA8Z408WLA4D68ZXlzrY3z5aM-&index=4&t=25s

Though in no way exhaustive, this series brought attention to the fact that religion—which in the second half of the twentieth century was seen as a waning force—has resurfaced as a main player in society and politics, often supporting illiberal and nationalist visions of governance and policies.

* The Martin-Springer Institute attends to the experiences of the Holocaust in order to relate them to today’s concerns, crises, and conflicts. Our programs promote the values of moral courage, tolerance, empathy, reconciliation, and justice. Founded by Doris, who survived the Holocaust, and her husband Ralph Martin, the Institute fosters dialogue on local, national, and international levels. http://nau.edu/martin-springer