Contemporary Church History Quarterly

Volume 23, Number 1/2 (June 2017)

Conference Report: “Election and Probation: Religious Elites and Social Leadership,” Bensheim Dialogue, Institut für Personengeschichte (Bensheim), April 20-22, 2017.

By Dirk Schuster, University of Potsdam

For the eighth time, the Institute for Personal History held the Bensheim Dialogue, a conference devoted to the historical study of individuals, social groups, and their relationship to society as a whole. This year’s conference was a continuation of last year’s meeting under the theme: Election and Probation: Religious Elites and Social Leadership (Erwähltheit und Berührung. Religiöse Eliten und sozialer Führungsanspruch). This year’s conference was focused on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Right from the start, in his introductory remarks, Volkhard Huth of the Institute for Personal History drew attention to the importance of the idea of election within Christian thought. It developed within the ascetic monasticism of antiquity, which, according to Sigmund Freud, ultimately depended on a special relationship between a deity and its recipient.

Michael Hirschfeld of the University of Vechta examined religious consciousness in German Catholic noble dynasties, using the example of the von Galen family. Continue reading →