Teaching the Reformation in a Pluralist Age

FAIN: EH-50083-06

Calvin College (Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4301)
Karin Yvonne Maag (Project Director: March 2006 to September 2008)

A three-week institute for thirty college and university teachers on the significance of the Reformation and its role in global history survey courses.

This three-week institute for college and university faculty (from June 25 to July 13, 2007) re-examines the Reformation’s wider significance and central importance for the overall narrative of global history survey courses. The discourse and debates ushered in by the sixteenth-century Reformation over competing ways of understanding the world and human interactions have strong parallels and points of contrast with similar confrontations in other major religions such as Islam. Lecturers will provide participants with the most up-to-date insights in Reformation studies and will help make connections between key Reformation themes and comparative themes in world history, including patterns of belief, popular religion, relations between governments and religious authorities, the role of women in religion, the impact of printing and the visual arts in communities of faith, and encounters between people of different ethnic backgrounds and faith traditions.