Redeemer University Receives Seerveld Collection
Redeemer University in Ancaster, Ont., recently received, by donation, the personal library of Dr. Calvin Seerveld, a significant scholar in neo-Calvinist thought. Upon his passing in August 2025, Seerveld’s art collection was donated to Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Ill., and his extensive library was donated to Redeemer. The library donation catalyzed a project to develop a space to house the collection, and that new space, created in the Peter Turkstra Library, has been named the H. Evan Runner Reading Room.
Seerveld was born in 1930 on Long Island, New York. He earned a bachelor of arts degree at Calvin University and a master of arts in English literature and classics at the University of Michigan. He completed a doctorate at the Free University of Amsterdam in philosophy and comparative literature. Seerveld helped to establish and became a professor at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Ill., and later moved to Canada to teach at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. Recognized for his work in philosophical aesthetics, Seerveld published a great number of essays and books, including Rainbows for the Fallen World: Aesthetic Life and Artistic Task.
Some years before his death, Seerveld had been searching for a home for his personal library, and a connection between him and a library volunteer at Redeemer planted seeds for making that home there. In early 2024, when Seerveld inquired further to seek assurance that the library and archival staff at Redeemer would do a good job of stewarding his resources, Armen Svadjian, director of the Peter Turkstra Library, made a visit to Seerveld’s home to gain a sense of the materials that would make up the collection, and he said that what he found was promising.
“There were many, many filing cabinets of personal papers, thousands of volumes reflecting his diverse scholarly interests—aesthetics, theology, philosophy, art history, biblical studies. It was rich! A boon for anyone interested in his thinking,” said Svadjian. He added that it was evident from the visit that Seerveld wanted his ideas accessible to many.
One thing that makes a personal collection interesting and valuable, said Svadjian, are the notes—or marginalia—made in books. Svadjian added that he found plenty of that in Seerveld’s collection: “Crack open a book, and there he is engaging with the author, having a rich conversation with him in the margin.”
Conversations with associate professor of religion and theology Dr. Jessica Joustra and archivist Brandon Swartzentruber on the value of the collection and the opportunity at hand, as well as a generous donation from a keenly interested supporter, solidified the agreement to move ahead.
“We felt that with the right resources, initiative, and enthusiasm, we could make this into something that would excite scholars around the world,” said Svadjian. The inherent research value of these resources is something that Redeemer staff and faculty are excited to take full advantage of, he added. Svadjian and his team are making plans to engage scholars across disciplines, including Redeemer students through class visits, opportunities for students to curate displays, and an annual conference with papers based on the rich contents of the collection.
Redeemer designated a 1,255 square-foot space within the library for renovation and incorporated compact shelving and space for displays and study. The space has been named the H. Evan Runner Reading Room, after a neo-Calvinist academic who studied under Herman Dooyeweerd and taught philosophy at Calvin University from 1951 to 1981. Runner was known to have encouraged many students—including Seerveld—to become scholars and teachers.
The Seerveld collection includes letters to famous authors, correspondence with students, lecture notes, written pieces from his youth, and drafts of hymns he wrote and composed for the 1987 Christian Reformed Church Psalter Hymnal. There are sermon manuscripts and plain-language translations of psalms ripe with Seerveld’s idiosyncrasies. There are typewriters and fountain pens—he only ever wrote with fountain pens—as well as samples of his preferred brand of ink.
Along with hundreds of books containing his personal notes in the margins, there are numerous papers with difficult-to-read handwriting. Swartzentruber noted that this challenge presented an opportunity to research and experiment with technology currently being used by other archivists in Canada and Europe. An artificial intelligence tool called Transkribus takes scans of handwritten work and, through viewing many documents from the same writer, learns to translate what the handwriting says. Those scans, along with other digitized items, will be accessible to the public on a website currently under development.
“There will be some mistakes,” says Swartzentruber of the AI-translation work, “but it will give people a huge head start on being able to understand what he’s saying.”
Svadjian said he feels that this work of transcription would please Seerveld. “While he wanted to stand out in uniqueness and have a style all his own, he also wanted to be down to earth and accessible. Cal seemed to be able to do both.”
