protestant (Lutheran) Colloquy is mentioned often in the first printed major works of the series, and occasionally crops up in the thirteen Gazettes existing solely as e-published works. The Rudolstadt Colloquy as historical background sits at the heart and center of the religious strife between Protestant sects which in our time line continued to divide the new churches even as they collectively battled the Roman Catholic dominated world and that church's Counter-reformation, the effort to reimpose a uniform religion on all of Europe. At the heart of the matter is the strongly held belief in the authoritarian philosophy, embraced by the nobility and churchmen alike, that a state cannot not stand without a uniform official religion. "From the perspective of the princes, religion was important in the 'here and now' because religion here and now was a way of making the population behave." To the modern mind, this seems a curious and perhaps incomprehensible point of view, but the modern man does not embrace the concept either that one class of people was explicitly set above all others and destined from birth to rule. Further, the position and power of all nobles draws from that belief and that of kings being the chosen and anointed protectors of both church and state, regardless of how well or poorly they conduct the business of taking care of the populace at large. Considered in that light, the colloquy and its results will be a major supporting event in the overall 1632 theme championing religious toleration. In the Rudolstadt Colloquy, internal tensions within the Lutheran community are contrasted and displayed. In addition to their mainstream Lutheran church, Grantville sends representatives from two smaller up-time Lutheran sects, the Missouri Synod and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Throughout Europe, both Catholic and Protestant countries either have heads of state attending in person or by proxy by sending a personal envoy to the long theological debate, which is chaired by the Graf Ludwig Guenther, Count of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt. Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt happen to be among the very nearest neighbors to Grantville's geographic position. Schwarzburg, in the fictional canon, in fact is so close that the Ring of Fire (ROF) transfer of territory between space-time continuums actually cuts through the outlying houses of the town, and several more that did not go to West Virginia in OTL 2000 AD, slid down the "newly formed" destabilized cliff that resulted immediately after