Freston to be Inaugurated as Byker Chair

February 19, 2004 == MEDIA ADVISORY
<<for the complete story see
http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/2003_04/freston.htm

Soon into his tenure as a professor at Calvin College, Paul Freston had an
unexpected opportunity.

He had been planning to attend a conference at Michigan State University on
the growth of Christianity around the world. But when the keynote speaker for
the conference was unable to get to East Lansing because of weather, conference
organizers called Freston in a panic, asking if he could substitute. Which he
did.

The last-minute pinch-hit, says Calvin provost Joel Carpenter, speaks to
Freston's abilities and what he brings to his new duties at the college.

"Paul Freston is one of the world's leading experts on Latin American
evangelical Christianity," says Carpenter, "and on evangelicals' public role
throughout the Global South. Christianity is the non-Western world's most
dynamic religion, and Calvin is working hard to understand that dynamism and to
partner with Christians from the southern and eastern nations. We gain a great
deal of strength and wisdom for those tasks by having Professor Freston working
with us."

Freston joined the Calvin faculty this school year as the first-ever holder of
the Gary and Henrietta Byker Chair in Christian Perspectives on Political,
Social and Economic Thought. And while the title is a mouthful, so too are
both the scope of the new chair's purpose and the breadth and depth of
Freston's expertise.

Consider Freston's book Evangelicals and Politics in Asia, Africa and Latin
America, a 358-page volume whose plain title belies the amazing wealth of
material contained between its covers. The book, published by Cambridge
University Press, has been hailed as "a pioneering comparative study of the
political aspects of the new mass evangelical Protestantism of sub-Saharan
Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia."

In the book Freston looks at 27 countries in the three major continents of the
Third World. And not just a cursory glance. He dug deeply into the religious
and political intertwinnings in those 27 countries, many of which he visited
and others of which he studied via personal contacts, documentary study and
interviews.

It is that interdisciplinary sensitivity that made Freston such a good fit for
the new Byker Chair, named for former Michigan State Senator Gary Byker and his
wife Henrietta, parents of current Calvin president Gaylen Byker.

Says Gaylen Byker: "Many of the most influential thinkers of the modern age
have stressed the interrelatedness of politics, society and the economy. No
one discipline can provide a fully orbed analysis of the complex events, forces
and ideas that sweep across our common life. Interdisciplinary studies, which
link and merge approaches from these disciplines, have added dimensionality to
our understanding of public life. This Chair was established to promote such
study. And we're thrilled that Paul accepted our offer to be the first holder
of the Chair."

The Byker Chair's express purpose is to "provide a comprehensive, Reformed
Christian approach to the ways in which human interactions and structures are
shaped and influenced by the dynamics of creation, the fall, redemption and
historical development."

That's an important emphasis for Freston who says the Reformed approach to
life always has resonated with him. For example, Freston says that the
implications of evangelical politics for democracy, nationalism and
globalization have great relevance beyond the Third World.

"Lack of understanding of global religious reality can be costly," he says.
"If terrorism is one of the weapons of the weak, we need to know what the
religions of the weak are, and what political options they authorize.
Christianity today is predominantly a non-Western religion and probably the
main religion in the Third World. More of the world's poor are now Christian
than Muslim. So what are their political tendencies? For American Christians
this is an important question not just for 'homeland safety' but also for
international justice."

Such questions were also a hallmark of Gary Byker who studied history and
sociology at Calvin despite never having attended high school! He parlayed
that Calvin degree into a career as a successful businessman and politician,
serving in the State Senate from 1968 to 1979.

The Byker Chair Inauguration will be held on Tuesday, March 2 in the Meeter
Center Lecture Hall and will feature an inaugural lecture by Freston as well as
talks by others, including Rosalind Hackett, of the department of religious
studies at the University of Tennesse, and Timothy Shah, director of the South
Asian Studies Program and a research fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy
Center in Washington, D.C. Shah also co-directs a research project based at
the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies on "Religion and Global
Politics."

<<for the complete story see
http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/2003_04/freston.htm

-end-
Received on Thu Feb 19 12:32:03 2004