Calvin: Geneva and the Reformation: a study of Calvin as social reformer, churchman, pastor and theologian

Reviewed Book: Wallace, Ronald S. Calvin: Geneva and the Reformation: a study of Calvin as social reformer, churchman, pastor and theologian. Grand Rapids: Baker Bk House, 1988

Our E-journal Journey: Where to Next?

In early 2003, the Hekman Library of Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary decided to offer access to all of its e-journals, including titles within aggregators, using brief MARC records in its online catalog. This article describes the history of this decision, and how recent developments in e-journal management will affect it in the future

Calvin Massey: Gentleman and Scholar

I first met Calvin Massey in person in 1994, when I joined the U.C. Hastings faculty. However, I knew of and admired Calvin’s scholarship long before that. Six years earlier, I was a law student at the University of Chicago, and a student editor at the law review. In that role, I helped cite-check and edit a major article authored by Calvin, as well as a series of short responses by Calvin and other scholars, debating the meaning and scope of the Eleventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I was struck then, and continue to be amazed, by the clarity, thoroughness, and intellectual rigor of this exchange, and especially Calvin’s contributions to it. I truly believe that these papers provide a model for what engaged, respectful, and careful scholarly debate should look like. They certainly provided an inspiration to me as I began my scholarly career, just as Calvin provided crucial mentorship during my early years at Hastings. In this brief essay I summarize this intellectual exchange, and explain why I think it epitomizes Calvin’s extraordinary strengths as a scholar, and as a gentleman

Why I So Enjoyed Learning With and From Calvin Massey

[Excerpt] “I am pleased and proud to participate in this tribute to Calvin Massey, with whom I had the pleasure to work and play for about two decades. When I think of Calvin—and I think of him often—I think of a generous friend, a gregarious colleague and a genuinely good man. He possessed many admirable traits, but today I want to focus on three: (1) his breadth; (2) his independent mind; and (3) his thoughtfulness.

The benefit of a 1-bit jump-start, and the necessity of stochastic encoding, in jamming channels

We consider the problem of communicating a message $m$ in the presence of a malicious jamming adversary (Calvin), who can erase an arbitrary set of up to $pn$ bits, out of $n$ transmitted bits $(x_1,\ldots,x_n)$. The capacity of such a channel when Calvin is exactly causal, i.e. Calvin's decision of whether or not to erase bit $x_i$ depends on his observations $(x_1,\ldots,x_i)$ was recently characterized to be $1-2p$. In this work we show two (perhaps) surprising phenomena. Firstly, we demonstrate via a novel code construction that if Calvin is delayed by even a single bit, i.e. Calvin's decision of whether or not to erase bit $x_i$ depends only on $(x_1,\ldots,x_{i-1})$ (and is independent of the "current bit" $x_i$) then the capacity increases to $1-p$ when the encoder is allowed to be stochastic. Secondly, we show via a novel jamming strategy for Calvin that, in the single-bit-delay setting, if the encoding is deterministic (i.e. the transmitted codeword is a deterministic function of the message $m$) then no rate asymptotically larger than $1-2p$ is possible with vanishing probability of error, hence stochastic encoding (using private randomness at the encoder) is essential to achieve the capacity of $1-p$ against a one-bit-delayed Calvin.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures, extended draft of submission to ISIT 201

Ministry Resource Center: Access Through A Database-driven Website

The new Ministry Resource Center (MRC) of Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary is a premiere collection of practical resources for all aspects of congregational ministry. To help MRC patrons locate appropriate resources, the College and Seminary s Hekman Library has created a website that combines information from manually created static webpages and bibliographic data imported from the Library s online catalog. The result is one website that gathers together, and provides access to, the entire MRC collection

Calvin, Geneva, and the Reformation

Reviewed Book: Wallace, Ronald S. Calvin, Geneva, and the Reformation. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 198

Calvin Massey, Gentleman Farmer

[Excerpt] “So much of Calvin’s work was intelligible as work about freedom and independence, preventing aggregations of government power that threatened individual freedom. Calvin didn’t love federalism because he had a romanticized view of statehood, he believed in it because he thought centralized power in the federal government was a bigger threat to individual freedom than states were. In most states, a tin-pot governor and amateur hour legislators just aren’t going to be as effective at coercing beliefs as an Executive Branch that contains the U.S. Treasury, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the CIA, not to mention the Pentagon and the Department of Education to tell us all how to teach our classes. Some colleagues thought that Calvin was a libertarian, and I honestly can’t remember whether he embraced that label or not, but he sure as hell didn’t want the government telling people what to think or how to behave in their private lives.

Jesus Christ in the preaching of Calvin and Schleiermacher

Reviewed Book: DeVries, Dawn. Jesus Christ in the preaching of Calvin and Schleiermacher. Louisville, Ky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1996. Columbia series in Reformed theology