Author Archives: Jordan Ballor

Jordan Ballor

About Jordan Ballor

Jordan Ballor (Dr. theol., University of Zurich; Ph.D., Calvin Theological Seminary) is associate director of the Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research of Calvin Theological Seminary. He also serves as senior research fellow and director of publishing at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty.

Spring 2014 Colloquium Series Announced

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We’ve posted the details for the Spring 2014 Junius Institute Colloquium series. First up is Dr. Donald Sinnema, professor of theology emeritus at Trinity Christian College, Palos Heights, IL. He’ll be discussing “The Project to Publish a Critical Edition of the Documents of the Synod of Dordt (1618–1619): The Sources, with a Focus on the Drafting of the Canons of Dordt” on Friday, February 7.

Join us if you’re in the area, and check out the rest of the details for the series at the project page here.
Synode van Dordrecht

A Whir, Click, and Rustle

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Todd Rester, Junius Institute Director

Todd Rester, the director of the Junius Institute, introduces the institute and our new digitization initiative over at the Calvin Seminary website. Click through for the whole thing, but here’s a snippet:

How do you make rare 16th century theological treasures available to students and scholars in the twenty first century? The innovative answer at the Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research (www.juniusinstitute.org) sounds like the whir of a robot, the click of a camera, and the rustle of 1,500 pages an hour.

The Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research is a new institute at Calvin Theological Seminary. This institute is dedicated to the preservation and presentation of rare works from the Reformation and post-Reformation era to students and scholars at home and abroad. The hum of these mechanized sounds emanate from an automated book scanner designed by one of the doctoral candidates at Calvin Theological Seminary, Todd Rester, who is also the director of the Junius Institute. “We have an opportunity to present and preserve the rare book holdings of the Hekman Library and the Meeter Center for Calvin Studies in a cost-effective and digital way to make a global impact.”

Todd will be posting more details soon on our proposed plan to digitize a first selection of items from the Hekman Library rare book collection and the holdings of the Meeter Center. But in the meantime, you can also view our digitization project page to see some of the very first works we have digitized.

For more information on the development of the Junius Institute, and ways to support our work, please read this letter from our director.

Maney Journals and EEBO

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Maney Publishing is offering a free period of two week access to its journals in philosophy and religion. These include Reformation and Renaissance Review, Political Theology, and Reformation. Details here.

So, if you don’t have regular access, take the time now to go get, for instance, Richard A. Muller’s “Not Scotist: Understandings of being, univocity, and analogy in early-modern Reformed thought” from the latest RRR. [Update: You’ll need to sign up to get access to Maney’s journals first at the “details” link above. Then you should have access to RRR content, including Muller’s article.] It won’t be available during the free period, but I’m also the guest editor for a forthcoming issue of RRR on the legacy of the Italian reformer, Peter Martyr Vermigli. So keep a lookout for that.

Also, the Renaissance Society of America has announced that its members will now have full access to EEBO. So for the price of RSA membership, you can get access to this important primary source collection.

Our Informal Anniversary

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Our research curator David Sytsma is teaching the doctoral methods course at Calvin Seminary this fall, and he recently passed on that he was discussing the increasing availability of sources that have come to be in the last five years in a recent class session.

He then went digging through some old emails, and found that the original finding list that would grow to become the PRDL, first in wiki and later in the current PRDL 2.0 format, was circulated in October 2008, just over five years ago. You can read more about the transition and development of PRDL in this piece from the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

David, who directs the PRDL project, writes further, “Looking back through the email thread, it was Jordan who suggested on Nov. 7 that we start a wiki and think about forming a digital research center.” So this day a sort of informal five year anniversary for the beginning of the PRDL and now the Junius Institute!

PRDL now covers over 4,500 authors, with listings of more than 85,000 volumes. Take a look at the original finding list to see where it all began, a short five years ago.

Colloquium: Jay Collier on ‘Troubles after Dort’

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Jay T. Collier

Jay T. Collier

One of the things that Dr. Randy Blacketer’s introduction of Richard Muller last week at the CTS PhD anniversary event made clear was the extent to which Dr. Muller has served as a real mentor to so many of his students. One of his legacies in this regard is the fostering of academic development represented in his encouragement of his students to regularly present their research findings in public lectures and readings of papers at conferences.

To this end, a number of years back Dr. Muller helped to create a graduate studies seminar at Calvin Theological Seminary, focused on the historical theology students. This seminar was relatively informal and yet met with some regularity. Current students would often present their research, and graduates would sometimes return to give an update on their current research. Other times visiting scholars would come and give a special lecture to the CTS community.

With the launch of the Junius Institute this year, these gatherings have been formalized into a Colloquium series, pursued in conjunction with the doctoral program at CTS. The aim of the program remains the same: to provide an outlet for students to present research on their dissertations and to be exposed to research projects in progress from graduates and established scholars.

The inaugural Colloquium lecture was given last month (Friday, September 13, 2013) by Jay T. Collier, a PhD candidate in historical theology at Calvin Theological Seminary. Jay also serves as the director of publishing at Reformation Heritage Books and as the project coordinator for the institute’s Colloquium series. After an introduction by Todd Rester, director of the Junius Institute, Jay presented on the topic, “Troubles after Dort: Augustine, Perseverance, and the Real Story of the ‘Arminian’ Richard Montagu.”

As part of our efforts to disseminate scholarship digitally and foster scholarly discourse, we’re happy to make the audio of this event available below. For more on Montagu, visit his page at PRDL. And check out the Colloquium page for more information about upcoming lectures in the Fall 2013 series.