Journeys in Church History, Volume 2 offers further reflections from leading contemporary church historians, who describe in their own words how they have come to practice their craft. They trace their family and educational backgrounds, the themes that attracted their attention, the challenges they encountered in researching them, the new methodologies they adopted to answer questions, and the reception given to their findings. They also tell of their experiences in the classroom, both as students and teachers, the difficulties they encountered in their careers due to prejudices based on gender or religion, and how the discipline of church history has changed over their lifetimes. Their often entertaining accounts will serve to inform and inspire fellow historians, both young and old. Featured in this collection are essays from scholars who study the church across the centuries. Dame Avril Cameron focused her work on religion in the Byzantine Empire. John Van Engen has been interested in lay religion in the Middle Ages and has studied the rise of the Modern Devotion with its Imitation of Christ and experiments in communal religious life. Robert Bireley, SJ, specialized on Jesuit confessors to Catholic rulers during the Thirty Years War and laid out how both the Catholic and Protestant churches tried to adjust to a changing world in the early modern period. Asuncion Lavrin has studied the role of women in the religious life of colonial Latin America. Hugh Mc Leod used sociological data to map how various Christian denominations fared in the industrialized world of modern Europe. And Leslie Tentler has traced the changes in American Catholicism, especially those related to the Second Vatican Council and the Church’s teaching on women and sex. Each scholar shares the difficulties he or she encountered in doing their research and how their findings were initially received. This collection of essays is taken from the pages of The Catholic Historical Review, the official organ of the American Catholic Historical Association and the only scholarly journal under Catholic auspices in the English-speaking world devoted to the history of the Universal Church.

When Martin Luther distributed his 95 Theses on indulgences on October 31, 1517, he set in motion a chain of events that profoundly transformed the face of Western Christianity. The 500th anniversary of the 95 Theses offered an opportunity to reassess the meaning of that event. The relation of the Catholic Church to the Reformation that Luther set in motion is complex. The Reformation had roots in the late-medieval Catholic tradition and the Catholic reaction to the Reformation altered Catholicism in complex ways, both positive and negative. The theology and practice of the Orthodox church also entered into the discussions. A conference entitled “Luther and the Shaping of the Catholic Tradition,” held at The Catholic University of America, with thirteen Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant speakers from Germany, Finland, France, the Vatican, and the United States addressed these issues and shed new light on the historical, theological, cultural relationship between Luther and the Catholic tradition. It contributes to deepening and extending the recent ecumenical tradition of Luther-Catholic studies.