In 1968 the first volume of a monumental publishing enterprise came from the press, Herder's Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie. The editor, the late Engelbert Kirschbaum, S.J., had planned the work to embrace six volumes, 1 to 4 dealing with general Christian themes, and 5 and 6 dealing with saints and other holy persons. The scope of the latter part, however, has subsequently been expanded, with the consequence that instead of two volumes, four will be needed to deal in a more comprehensive way with the saints that are to be included. (At the time of this writing three of these four volumes have been published.)

“Altogether, the Iconoclast controversy is in the grip of a crisis of over-explanation.” Since in his recent article Peter Brown is himself offering an explanation, we need to ask whether he has relaxed one grip only to fasten on another. Brown's analysis is characteristically brilliant. With a few deft strokes he outlines where scholarship is and what culs-de-sac it has got itself into, and he focuses attention on aspects of the evidence that have been insufficiently appreciated. Brown is peculiarly sersitive to the nature of religion, and as a result his article is an excellent account of the complex dynamics of religion in early Byzantium.

There have been numerous studies of the religious leaders of early modern Europe, but accounts of the religious attitudes and interests of the general public have been highly impressionistic. It might seem a hopeless task to try to reconstruct a profile of the religious mind of such a remote period, and yet historians are not deterred from making broad characterizations, and other disciplines sometimes build on them. The question is not so much whether we must give up such descriptions entirely, but how rigorous we can be in making them.

The German women's movement, like so much else that was progressive in modern German history, had its origins during the decade culminating in the revolution of 1848. An important and neglected source of German feminism may be found in the radical separatist congregations which appeared in both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant communions during those years. Historical interest in early German feminism has centered almost exclusively on Louise Otto-Peters, partly because of her extraordinary contribution and partly because her personal involvement gives continuity to the women's movement, linking the activities of the 1840s with the founding of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein in 1865, the association which signals the birth of the modern campaign for women's rights in Germany. Religious radicalism on the other hand was stifled in all of its organized manifestations during the reaction of the 1850s. Little survived to remind future feminists of its seminal importance to their cause. Yet Louise Otto-Peters herself felt that the nonconforming religious movement offered the single most important manifestation of female emancipation in pre-revolutionary Germany.

Though historians of religion in the United States have long recognized the importance of Mormonism, scholarly studies such as those by Mario De Pillis, Marvin Hill, and Louis Reinwand have only begun to explain the church's meaning and attraction. As a recent scholar of American religious history has argued,

the exact significance of this great story persistently escapes definition.…One cannot even be sure if the object of our consideration is a sect, a mystery cult, a new religion, a church, a people, a nation, or an American subculture; indeed, at different times and places it is all of these.…[The Mormons] remain people apart.…Their inner intellectual and spiritual problems cannot easily be shared with others.

The sympathy of most English Catholics during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 lay with General Francisco Franco and the other generals who had rebelled against the Second Spanish Republic. If there was any doubt of this, the spate of literature which then appeared, much of it polemical, and the journalistic views presented could leave little doubt on the matter. The adoption of an anti-Republican stance in English Catholic circles, while not complete, nevertheless implied an adverse judgment upon the viability and legitimacy of the Republic, if not its legality, from 1936 onward. The Republic had failed in its primary obligation—to rule justly—and the military revolt had been necessary to forestall anarchy or communism. The judgment that the Republic had failed, however, was not an a priori one, nor was it enthusiastically reached so much as accepted.

Nihilism has been present in Western culture for many centuries, but no century has been so permeated by nihilism as has our own. With perceptive insight Alexander Salzhenitsyn recently observed that Western democracy is in its “last decline,” has no ethical foundation, and consists only of “parties, and social classes engaged in a conflict of interests, just interests, nothing higher.” Solzhenitsyn's observation can hardly be brushed aside. His words describe a nihilism that is prominent in more than Western democracy, Nihilism reaches as far back as Ecclesiastes in our Old Testament and Nargarjuna in Buddhism. Perhaps no century has been without it, but in our century it has become pervasive, finding expression not only in a flood of literature but in virtually every phase of our existence. The Nazi holocaust, Vietnam, the “death of God,” and Watergate fall within its scope. It is so pervasive that it merits attention, especially from church historians.