Prof. Frans van Liere awarded IAS Fellowship
Frans van Liere has been appointed a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for the academic year 2012-2013. The IAS is one of the world's leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It was founded in 1930 by philanthropists Louis Bamberger and his sister Caroline Bamberger Fuld. Past Faculty have included distinguished scientists and scholars such as Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Erwin Panofsky, Kenneth Setton, and George Kennan. Read more.
Faculty receive CCCS grants
History Profs Robert Schoone-Jongen and Eric Washington have recently been awarded grants by Calvin Center for Christian Studies.
"Theodore F. Koch and Religious Colonization on the Great Plains, 1884-1930"
Says Prof Schoone-Jongen, "This CCCS grant will underwrite my longstanding study of Theodore F. Koch. He was a Dutch American entrepreneur who arrived in the United States in 1884. During the next forty years, he sold hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland in Minnesota and Texas to immigrants from Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands who hoped to build communities and congregations on the Great Plains. People bought Koch’s land because Protestant ministers and Catholic priests endorsed his projects and vouched for his reliability. So did the Dutch government, various state and local politicians in the United States, and an assortment of railroad companies, bankers, and land barons. Koch's colonization efforts captured the interplay between foreign investors, hopeful immigrants, their desire to preserve their ancient faith in new places, the most up to date science of the period, and the realities of American free enterprise economics. By looking closely his story, we can gain a fuller understanding of the complex influences that converged to produce America's agricultural 'heartland' culture between 1880 and 1920."
"Heralding Africa's Redemption: African-American Baptists and Ethiopianism, 1815-1930"
Says Prof Washington, "The CCCS grant will enable me to engage in further research on the topic of African American Baptists and their history of African missions emphasizing how they conceptualized their place in African redemption from 1815-1930. The conceptual focus is on the theology and philosophy called Ethiopianism, which is a theology developed by African American Protestants during the 19th century to explain both God's purpose in enslaving persons of African descent and their acceptance of the gospel. In dealing with the inherent tension such a conceptualization brought, African American Protestants believed that God's plan in enslaving them was to introduce them to the gospel and Western civilization, emancipate them, and have them return to Africa as missionaries and colonizers. Framing their mission within Ethiopianism and a strong evangelical fervor, from 1815 onward African American Baptists organized missionary societies and supported their own missionaries to Africa.
My research will extend and broaden my previous research to include more of this history during the 19th century from the 1815 founding of the Richmond African Missionary Society by African American Baptists to the founding of the Lott Carey Baptist Foreign Mission Convention in 1897. The research will highlight how African American Baptists articulated Ethiopianism as both leaders of missionary organizations and as missionaries in Africa during this period, and how their perceptions of Africa and African redemption reflected both African American nationalism and Pan-Africanism as well as Western views of missions of civilization."
Umm el-Jimal Archeology Grants
Professor Bert de Vries has been awarded two prestigious grants for work at Umm el-Jimal, a well preserved town from the Roman, Byzantine, Early Islamic and modern eras. The first is a $25,000 
virtual site preservation grant from the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA). The second is a $96,000 from the Ambassador Fund for Cultural Preservation, awarded by the US State Department for preservation of the ruins of house XVIII, and one of four awarded for the Middle East. Calvin students will be involved in this project both in the Archeology department and on-site in Jordan over Interim 2012. Read more.
NEH Summer Institute 2012:
American Frontiers in Global Perspective
Profs Will Katerberg and Bob Schoone-Jongen, with their colleague Carol Higham (from North Carolina) have received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant for a summer institute for high school teachers, to be hosted by Calvin from June 24 to July 14, 2012. This teaching institute will focus on rethinking the uniqueness and nature of US frontiers and ideas of American exceptionalism by looking at these aspects of US history on their own terms and from global, comparative, and trans-national perspectives. Calvin Profs William Van Vugt and Jamie Skillen (Geology) will also be involved. Read more.
Healing Children of Conflict update
The local NGO, Healing Children of Conflict, which includes historians Kristin Du Mez, Doug Howard and Bert de Vries, successfully completed the medical rehabilitation of Hamzah al-Daeni, a nine-year old Iraqi boy. Hamzah, whose right leg, hip, and partial intestines had been destroyed by the shrapnel of an American missile in 2008, was brought to Grand Rapids for six weeks in May and June for prosthetic fitting, physical therapy, and medical assessment. The work was possible through an outpouring of generosity by donors, doctors, volunteers, rehab specialists, and key institutions like the Ronald Macdonald House and Mary Free Bed Hospital. Seeing the transformation of Hamzah was a blessing to all who participated and witnessed it. In mid-June Hamzah and his father returned home to Baghdad, where HCC will be assisting with locally administered plastic surgical procedures on Hamzah’s large stomach wound. HCC looks forward to having Hamzah back in Grand Rapids for the refitting of his prosthetic leg within two years.
