News and History from Heritage Hall
The little “trade school” for pastors founded by the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) in 1876 has evolved into Calvin Theological Seminary and Calvin University. Every twenty-five years, starting with its fiftieth anniversary in 1926, Calvin has retold its story. In 1901, the Theological School and …
Last year, Dr. Katerberg wrote a post about the other Calvin Colleges (fictional and real). Another fun “Calvin” fact is that the University shares its name with a World War II era ship. During the war, the US government commissioned hundreds of Liberty class ships. …
Most people who know that Calvin Theological Seminary and Calvin University have had more than one campus only know about the “Franklin” campus on what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Street. A few know about the “Madison” campus, at the corner of Madison and …
The Spring 2025 issue of Origins is in print and in the hands of subscribers. Here is a free article from the Spring issue. In it, Robert Schoone-Jongen tells the story of the Wispelwey family. It migrated from the Netherlands to the United States in 1910, arriving in …
When did Calvin first graduate students with baccalaureate degrees? (And who was the first student to earn one?) The question might seem straight-forward. Just get the year right. But the past is usually messier than we remember. When we tell the stories of communities and …
The spring 2025 issue of Origins magazine is in the works. Here is a free article from the Fall 2024 issue. Peter Bulthuis tells the story of Dick Veenendaal, a Dutch immigrant to Canada in the 1930s; after World War II, he helped meet the …
In 1917 there was a major debate ongoing among Christian Reformed folk around Prospect Park, NJ. They needed to decide if it was time to establish a Christian high school. Most people in the mainly blue-collar, immigrant community saw education beyond the basics of reading …
Calvin College’s relationship with the University of Michigan began in the 1890s. In its founding in 1876 the Theological School (as the seminary was known then) had created a “literary” program to prepare students with no high school education for its theological program. In the …
“The” Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is not the only Calvin College there has been in the United States. There were two others. One existed in a comic book universe where a superhero, Al Pratt, AKA The Atom, was a student majoring in nuclear …
“Family stories” can mean a lot of things. For the Spring 2024 issue of Origins, it means two things: stories about families in the literal sense and stories that expand and diversify how we think about the Reformed “family.” This blogpost includes one of those …
