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Published by Calvin Seminary
Chaplains in Chapel
On U.S. Veterans Day, November 11, 2009, CTS encouraged veterans on the faculty and in the student body to attend chapel in uniform. Morning worship that day was led by chaplains, some of whom are CTS alumni.
Korean Alumni Welcome President Plantinga
In November 2009 CTS President Neal Plantinga spent a week in Seoul, South Korea where he lectured on Calvin and
a Reformed worldview at Hanyoung Theological University and Seminary—an institution in transition from being Pentecostal to being Presbyterian. He was accompanied by Pastor Christian Oh, Plantinga’s former student and a former trustee of the seminary, who served as his translator.
At Sarang (“Love”) Community Church he met with the group of Korean CTS alumni pictured here. Sarang Community Church, a congregation of four thousand worshipers, was founded in 1978 by Calvin alumnus John Oak, and is currently led by another CTS graduate, Senior Pastor Jung-Hyun Oh. Plantinga also preached in two Presbyterian churches and in the Yoido Full Gospel Church—which, with its 500,000 members, is the biggest congregation in the world.
Ph.D. Program has Global Impact in 2009
CTS has offered a Ph.D. degree for the past 17 years, and the 33 graduates of that program have made strategic contributions to teaching and scholarship throughout the world. 2009 was a banner year for Ph.D. students making substantive contributions in scholarship during their program at CTS.
No American seminary or Ph.D. pro- gram had as much representation as CTS at the international congress held at the University of Geneva this past May in honor of John Calvin’s 500th birthday. Professor Richard Muller gave a plenary address, and alumni Randy Blacketer and Yudha Thianto and current Ph.D. students Ted Van Raalte and Heber Campos delivered papers.
Campos stayed in Geneva where he and CTS student Dariusz Brycko both delivered papers at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in early June. Brycko went on to offer a paper in Poland, a result of which was the visit of a Polish scholar to CTS in November to give a paper at the Meeter Center and begin organizing an international colloquium on the Polish Reformation
Also in May, CTS students Jordan Ballor and Nathan Jacobs delivered papers at a conference in Bretten, Germany, on
“Reformierte Philosophie in der frühen Neuzeit”, where most of the other participants were European professors. The CTS contingent was very well received and the papers will be published. Ballor and Todd Rester are planning to participate in a conference in Venice on electronic Internet research and present on the new Post-Reformation Digital Library resource they developed. Jacobs has also published several articles and co-authored a book on Immanuel Kant.
In June, Muller presented at a Calvin conference in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, at which student Albert Gootjes also offered a paper which will be published. In addition to working on his dissertation, Gootjes has published an article in a French scholarly journal and has trans- lated two scholarly books from Dutch into English. Also that month, recent graduate Keith Stanglin gave an outstanding presentation at an international Arminius conference in the Netherlands, and was interviewed for Dutch TV.
How does CTS’s Ph.D. program accomplish all of this? Financial support is available from the Dodds Fund to send students to conferences, and students are prepared through unique courses specifically designed to teach them how to produce a convincingly argued, professional-level essay, and ultimately a monograph. The result has been very good preparation for academic conferences.
Also, CTS’s Ph.D. program has cultivated a high level of professionalism in research, as evidenced by the research guide project developed in the program, which focuses on rare texts available in online libraries. Check out the Post-Reformation Digital Library at http://libguides.calvin.edu/prdl.
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