Calvin Center Awards Research Grants

December 16, 2008

The Governing Board for the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship recently awarded six grants totaling $151,434 to Calvin College professors and others to conduct research on a range of faith-related topics.

This year, the board received twelve major grant proposals requesting a total of $500,474. The center for Christian Scholarship has been handing out grants that “fund high-quality, intentionally Christian scholarship” for 30 years, according to the center’s Web site. The projects that the center funds “have especially tried to bring academic expertise to a generally educated audience by addressing issues of lively concern in the church and society as well as the academy.”

The center publically announced the grants on Dec. 11. With an endowment that normally yields about $250,000 a year, the center spends about 80 percent of its annual budget to fund research, out of which have come a number of books over the years.

One of the recent publications that has ties to the center is “The Bible, Rocks and Time,” by Davis Young, professor emeritus of geology, and Ralph Stearley, a Calvin College geology professor. The book offers an accessible and readable presentation of the geological evidence for the age of the earth. 

This year’s grants have been awarded to:

  • David Warners, professor of biology, to support a project that will create a sustainable program of creation care for churches in North America, “Creation Care in Missions.”
  • Joel Zwart, Calvin’s Director of Exhibitions, and Jo-Ann Van Reeuwyk, an associate professor of art education at Calvin College , in collaboration with Rachel Smith  from Taylor University, David JP Hooker from Wheaton College, and Rondall Reynoso from Louisiana College for a traveling exhibit that brings Asian and North American artists to the wider public, “Charis, Christianity, Contextualization and the Arts.”
  • Timothy Steele and Benita Wolters-Fredlund, both faculty members of the music department at Calvin College, in collaboration with Johann Buis from Wheaton College, Stanley C. Pelkey from Western Michigan University, James Brooks Kuykendall from Erskine College, and Karen A. De Mol from Dordt College, to engage the discipline of musicology from a Christian perspective by means of conference presentations and an edited volume, “Crisis, Justice, Peace: Christian Voices in Musicology.”
  • James Bratt, a Calvin College professor of history, and John Bolt, a professor of systematic theology at Calvin Theological Seminary, in collaboration with Paul J. Visser, of Bethlehem Kerk, a church, to sponsor, in conjunction with Calvin Theological Seminary and the Dutch Reformed Translation Society, an English-language primer on the works of J. H. Bavinck, “Johan Herman Bavinck Translation Project.”
  • Shirley Roels, Director of the Van Lunen Center at Calvin, to support an international conference in celebration of the formation of the World Communion of Reformed Churches that will result in a subsequent book on the issues of tradition, translation, communities, and institutional identity, “Reformed Mission in an Age of World Christianity.”
  • Julie Yonker and Laura DeHaan, members of  the psychology faculty at Calvin College, to produce a literature review and a meta-analysis for the social sciences on the topic of religious faith among adolescents and young adults, “The State of Religious Faith in Adolescents and Young Adults.”

Ongoing projects include preparation of a volume on Christian higher education around the world that includes current data on its institutional spread and thematic essays on its recent development and future prospects, as well as a research project on a rhetorical study of Jonathan Edwards’ sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”