News and History from Heritage Hall
For the past half year, I’ve been doing re-photography posts on Heritage Hall’s Facebook site. Usually it is two pictures, one from the deeper past and a more recent image, sometimes a photograph I’ve taken. Some of the posts include a story about the congregation, …
The previous two blog posts started a story told by Dan Poortenga about his great grandfather Peter Oudshoorn. Dan first wrote this story as a paper in a Calvin College history course in the early 1990s. He interviewed his great grandfather and set his story …
Our previous blog post started the story of Peter Oudshoorn emigrating from the Netherlands to the United States in 1904, as told by his great grandson, Dan Poortenga. Dan first wrote about Oudshoorn in an assignment for a Calvin College history course in the early …
This week’s blog post is based on a paper by Dan Poortenga, who graduated from Calvin College in 1992. In a history course on the Netherlands with Herb Brinks, then curator of Heritage Hall, Dan wrote an essay about his great grandfather, Peter Oudshoorn, who …
My title — “Play ball?” — really should have two question marks. I picked this topic because I’ve been watching to see whether North Americans will get major league baseball this Covid-19 summer. That’s one question. The other is whether Christian athletes should play on …
What shapes an identity? What makes a community? I grew up in Dutch Reformed immigrant communities in towns and rural areas in Ontario, Canada, in the 1970s and early 1980s. My father was the “dominee” in a series of congregations from the Ottawa region to …