Contemporary Church History Quarterly
Volume 31, Number 3 (Fall 2025)
Conference Report: “Critical Presentism: Working on Churches/Theology/Religion and the Holocaust in 2025,” Religion and Socio-Cultural Transformation: European Perspectives and Beyond, European Academy of Religion 8th Annual Conference, Vienna, July 2025
By Lauren Faulkner Rossi, Simon Fraser University
In early July 2025, a subset of the editorial board of Contemporary Church History Quarterly gathered at the European Academy of Religion’s eighth annual conference, hosted in Vienna, Austria. The closed panel session was devoted to individual attempts to take stock of the evolution of our scholarship in the broader flow of transformations and rapid change both in our field and in the political and scholarly landscapes around us. The panel’s title, “Critical Presentism”, was proposed as “an evocative reversal of our general understanding of ‘presentism’ as an uncritical adherence to present-day approaches,”[1] especially the tendency to approach and interpret the past through the prism of contemporary values and happenings.
