Sexuality Series
Why this Series?
First and foremost, this series is for you—the students. It’s been designed to respond to your feedback and requests, given in 2004 trough a Calvin campus survey and climate study.
In that survey, we asked for student feedback on quality and quantity of opportunities to discuss issues of human sexuality, and students’ perspectives on how we were treating one another. Those who responded gave important and direct feedback.
-You said you wanted more opportunities to discuss sexuality, but you didn’t want more classes for credit. You did want venues that would allow conversations to go deeper than one lecture or a one-week series.
-You said you'd heard comments from other students about sexuality that seemed uninformed, inaccurate, and even hurtful.
-You said you wanted to know what the Bible said about issues of sexuality.
-Mostly, you wanted to have places to discuss questions with people you could trust.
While not every topic under the broad heading of human sexuality was of interest to each respondent, many of you said that a topic that didn’t interest you now might at another time. Could some seminars repeat? Most of you found yourselves at different places
Why These Books, Topics and Speakers?
So, the idea is to have a sexuality series each spring. It will be longer than a week and will either originate new programming or capture the good stuff other people on campus have already organized—like the January Series, Gender Studies opportunities, or Student Activities Office programs.
The planning team is a mix of Student Life people with lots of input from faculty, staff, and student organizers. The students are sophomores, seniors, gay, straight, male, female. Students have previewed some of the books and we’ll try to have their reviews up on the web page.
This year we started with books authored by people on campus, like Dr. Laura Smit; or people coming to campus, like Lauren Winner and Jo Kadlecek. Some books were recommended to us by our team members. We chose a book by Hope College professor David Myers and Letha Dawson Scanzoni because it deals with an important cultural and personal topic that interests people. Paired with this book are some readings that will form the basis for excellent discussions led by Chaplain Cooper. The bookclubs— as we are calling them—are open to everyone. Sign up soon, because spaces have been going fast.
Some conversations will be fun and informative, like our “Things I wish I knew about men/women before I married one.” Some conversations will go deeper. Linda Dykstra, a professional marriage counselor and mediator is going to talk about her book on how to have a good relationship. Who wants a bad relationship? This website will allow you to learn about the topics for this year, and we hope you will suggest topics for next year’s series.