On July 10, 2024, Calvin celebrates its five-year anniversary since it changed its last name from "college" to "university." News & Stories highlights ten significant moments for Calvin since it made that change in 2019.
On Thursday, April 25, David I. Smith was awarded Calvin University's Presidential Award for Exemplary Teaching—the highest teaching honor the university bestows on its faculty.
In the fall of 2023, Calvin University and Trinity Christian College faculty members from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) areas participated in an online webinar to share teaching strategies and practices informed by Christian faith.
When Rocky Chang escorted his daughter back to college, he didn't anticipate he'd be joining her on campus a year later. His visit proved fruitful and his calling seemed undeniable. Now, he's doing something he's never been able to do before in his 30-year teaching career: integrate his faith and his teaching.
Calvin University has signed Memorandum of Understandings (MOUs) with Handong Global University and Baekseok University, representing a commitment to foster partnerships of mutual educational benefit with the two South Korean private Christian institutions.
After taking a seminar in graduate school on the nature of blame and moral responsibility, Professor Joe Shin became fascinated with this subject that intersects philosophy and moral psychology. Now as a de Vries postdoctoral teaching fellow at Calvin University, he gets to share this interest with philosophy students in his classes.
Jae Yang is interested in public theology because of its “great potential to change the world, not just the church." As a member of the de Vries Institute’s postdoctoral cohort, Yang teaches classes for the Calvin Religion Department, pursues his research work, and meets with faculty mentors and the other postdocs to practice what it means to be a Christian scholar.
As a Christian historian interested in 18th century evangelicalism, de Vries postdoctoral fellow Tucker Adkins recognized the need for fresh scholarship on this much-studied movement and time period in British and American religious history.
Professor Dirksen is a de Vries Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, part of a cohort that spends two years at Calvin University developing their teaching and shaping their work as Christian scholars. His time at Calvin has also included a partnership with the Clean Water Institute and the City of Grand Rapids to research the state-mandated process of removing all lead service lines.
Makoto Fujimura is the recipient of the 2023 Kuyper Prize, awarded by Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary. Fujimura is the first visual artist to receive the prize, which has been awarded annually since 1998.
Just as the criminal justice system can benefit from a shift from a retributive to a restorative mindset, so also can faculty members as they address situations of plagiarism and cheating with students.
In the summer of 2022, ten Calvin University faculty members from a wide variety of disciplines gathered for an intense week together exploring the relationship between Christian faith and creativity. The seminar, “Faith Cultivating Creativity,” sponsored by the de Vries Institute for Global Faculty Development, invited participants to reflect together on the role of creativity in life and learning.
Since Calvin changed its last name from "college" to "university" in 2019, the institution has established two new schools, added six graduate programs, set fundraising records, and become the first university in MIchigan to award bachelor's degrees behind bars.
There’s a collection of key words or phrases that consistently appear in the efforts to practice the integration of faith and learning. Though meant to invoke a rich element of Christian tradition, these phrases can be oversimplified into clichés or buzzwords that miss out on the theological fullness that they're intended to point to. As part of the Calvin Symposium on Worship this past January, Matt Lundberg, director of the de Vries Institute, hosted a conversation with biblical scholar and theologian N.T. Wright to go “beyond cliché” and refresh the depth of these phrases.
On Wednesday, April 6, during the Kuyper Conference, Ruth Padilla DeBorst will accept the 2022 Abraham Kuyper Prize for Excellence in Reformed Theology and Public Life.
Rachael Denhollander, recognized as a leading voice on the topic of sexual abuse, is the recipient of the 2021 Kuyper Prize. The prize is awarded by Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary.
The conversation surrounding faith and science doesn’t have to be divisive; in fact, biochemistry professor Rachael Baker has found that faith is a tool that makes a better scientist.
How does faith inform teaching? This is a relevant question to professors at Calvin University who hope to equip their students to think deeply, act justly, and live wholeheartedly (the Calvin mission statement), and one that David Smith explores in his book On Christian Teaching: Practicing Faith in the Classroom.
