Book Launch and Panel Discussion: Abraham Kuyper’s Perspective on Islam

James Bratt (Ph.D., Yale University) taught in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pittsburgh before returning to his alma mater, Calvin College, where he taught in the History Department for twenty-nine years until his retirement in 2016. He has received numerous scholarly awards, including three Fulbright grants for research in the Netherlands and teaching in China. He is author of Abraham Kuyper: Modern Calvinist, Christian Democrat (Eerdmans, 2013), the definitive English-language biography of Kuyper, and editor of the path-breaking English translation of Kuyper’s shorter works, Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Eerdmans, 1998).

Douglas A. Howard (Ph.D., Indiana University) is Professor of History at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has directed off-campus study programs in Hungary, Turkey, and Washington, D.C. He is a former editor of The Turkish Studies Association Bulletin and the author of two books, A History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 2017), and The History of Turkey (Second edition, Greenwood, 2016), as well as academic articles on Ottoman administrative and literary history.

Jan van Vliet (Ph.D., Westminster Theological Seminary) is Professor of Economics at Dordt College, Sioux Center, Iowa. He has advanced degrees in economics and theology from educational institutions in Canada and the United States. He has spent many years in these two fields in both countries in private sector consulting, in the public service, and in the academy. His contributions and competencies focus on Reformed theology and philosophy, Kuyperian and Reformational thought, and shifting economic paradigms. He is the author of The Rise of Reformed System (Paternoster/Wipf & Stock, 2013) and currently, with Calvin Seerveld, is overhauling Seerveld’s earlier book on Reformational hermeneutics entitled How to Read the Bible to Hear God Speak. His work has been translated and published in Korean and Dutch scholarly journals.