Making Sense of the Reformation
This summer, twenty-five high school history teachers from across the country gathered at Calvin College for the three week National Endowment for the Humanities Institute "Making Sense of the Reformation."
Scholars from various universities presented lectures on belief systems in the Reformation era including early modern Catholic, Lutheran, Anabaptist, and Calvinist beliefs. The institute intentionally included the Catholic Reformation as one key aspect of the transformations of religious culture in the sixteenth century.
The first sessions helped participants develop approaches to teach complex concepts to high school students in accessible ways by stressing the involvement of early modern lay-people across confessional boundaries in the shaping of both doctrine and religious practice.
In the second week, the group considered ways in which early modern people made the leap from belief to practice. These sessions also provided a rich array of materials that participants could use of in their classes to whet students’ interest through music, images, and primary source texts.
In the third week, the group will considered three different models of communities in which religious conflict emerged and was dealt with in three very different ways. Participants were then able to make use of what they learned in the earlier sessions as well as their own prior knowledge to make fruitful comparisons with other situations of religious conflict, past and present.
This NEH Institute was co-directed by Karin Maag and Bob Schoone-Jongen.
