Calvin Earns Luce Grant
It took three years of conversations and proposal development, but the end result was worth the effort for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship which has received a $225,000 grant from the New York-based Henry Luce Foundation (created by Henry R. Luce, the founder and editor-in-chief of TIME magazine).
The grant will make possible three summer faculty seminars in the area of worship and the arts, a stronghold for the Calvin Institute which each January runs a highly popular Symposium on Worship and the Arts.
Says Institute director John Witvliet (above): "We can expect to host 30 professors of worship, theology, music, art, preaching and more for a month-long seminar on campus. This program will be designed to promote rigorous and well-grounded liturgical scholarship that will enrich the teaching and practice of Christian worship in seminaries, colleges, universities and congregations."
The seminars in worship and the arts will complement Calvin's already established Summer Seminar Program (which is supported by endowments, Calvin funds and such foundations as The Pew Charitable Trusts, the Templeton Foundation, and Fieldstead and Company).
Calvin staff from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, which is becoming recognized as a national center of interdisciplinary liturgical research and congregational worship renewal, will support the new seminars, while the day-to-day operations of the new program will be carried out by the office of the Calvin College Seminars in Christian Scholarship, which has 5 years of experience in running similar programs (see www.calvin.edu/fss).
At the center of this program would be an annual four-week summer seminar to enable faculty, primarily from seminaries and independent Christian and church-related colleges and universities, to participate in high-level academic discussions of critical worship-related topics. They would work toward producing first-order scholarship that would be disseminated in published form.
One seminar would be offered in each of the years 2002, 2003, and 2004 on the campuses of Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary. The seminar leaders will be senior scholars who are widely recognized as leading authorities in their fields. Ten scholars will be selected to participate in each seminar. This group could also include clergy with an interest in academic discussions of these topics, as well as especially qualified graduate students.