Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY
/
Calvin President Resigns Over Inappropriate Messages
Calvin President Resigns Over Inappropriate Messages
Oct 22, 2024 4:44 AM

  The president of Calvin University has resigned after admitting he engaged in inappropriate communication with a member of the campus community.

  In a statement Monday, the Calvin Board of Trustees said it had received a report alleging President Wiebe Boer engaged in unwelcome and inappropriate communication and attention toward a non-student member of the campus community.

  The report did not include allegations of sexually explicit communication or physical contact, but the alleged conduct is concerning and inappropriate, the trustees said in their statement.

  University officials said they then hired an outside expert to review the allegations. That review included speaking with Boer, a former oil executive and son of Christian Reformed Church missionaries who became Calvins president in 2022.

  After being notified of the report, Dr. Boer denied some of the allegations but did admit to sending communications that were inappropriate and inconsistent with the high standard of conduct and character expected of the President of Calvin University, the board said in its statement. Dr. Boer subsequently offered his resignation, which the Board accepted.

  No further details about Boers conduct or the complaint were given.

  Gregory Elzinga, Calvins vice president of advancement, has been named interim president. The boards statement described him as already being involved in the day-to-day management of the school and well situated to provide effective continuity of leadership while the Board conducts a thorough search for the Universitys next permanent President.

  School officials plan to hold a campus meeting for students with Elzinga on Thursday.

  Boer became president of Calvin at a time when the school had been under pressure to abide by the rules of the Christian Reformed Church in North America, in particular the churchs teaching about sexuality. In 2022, the denomination ruled that congregations and church members must abide by church teaching on marriage and sexwhich state that only heterosexual sex within marriage is allowed.

  That teaching is now considered a part of the churchs core confessionand applies to Calvin, which allows openly LGBTQ students to attend but requires faculty and staff to support the churchs confessions.

  Some faculty have asked for a gravamen, which would allow them to officially state their concerns about a church doctrine.

  A Calvin professor said his contract was not renewed after he officiated a same-sex wedding for a staffer at a research center that had been affiliated with the school. That center and the school also have cut ties.

  In the fall of 2022, Boer told Religion News Service that Calvin will continue to be hospitable to its LGBTQ students. I dont want to be the president of an institution that isnt welcoming to everybody, Boer said.

  Boer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

  In its announcement of Boers resignation, the trustees said they take our responsibility to provide an environment free from discrimination, harassment, and retaliation very seriously and continually strive to promptly and thoroughly respond to allegations of misconduct.

  We ask for prayers for the entire Calvin community, trusting that the Holy Spirit will comfort all of us in the sustaining grace of God, now and always, they said in their statement.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY
Mistaken About Poverty
Perhaps it is because America is the land of liberty and opportunity that debates about poverty are especially intense in the United States. Americans and would-be Americans have long been told that if they work hard enough and persevere they can achieve their dreams. For many people, the mere existence of poverty—absolute or relative—raises doubts about that promise and the American experiment more generally. Is it true that America suffers more poverty than any other advanced democracy in the...
Adam Smith and the Poor
Adam Smith did not seem to think that riches were requisite to happiness: “the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments). But he did not mend beggary. The beggar here is not any beggar, but Diogenes the Cynic, who asked of Alexander the Great only to step back so as not to cast a shadow upon Diogenes as he reclined alongside the highway....
Up from the Liberal Founding
During the 20th century, scholars of the American founding generally believed that it was liberal. Specifically, they saw the founding as rooted in the political thought of 17th-century English philosopher John Locke. In addition, they saw Locke as a primarily secular thinker, one who sought to isolate the role of religion from political considerations except when necessary to prop up the various assumptions he made for natural rights. These included a divine creator responsible for a rational world for...
C.S. Lewis and the Apocalypse of Gender
From very nearly the beginning, Christianity has wrestled with the question of the body. Heretics from gnostics to docetists devalued physical reality and the body, while orthodox Christianity insisted that the physical world offers us true signs pointing to God. This quarrel persists today, and one form it takes is the general confusion among Christians and non-Christians alike about gender. Is gender an abstracted idea? Is it reducible to biological characteristics? Is it a set of behaviors determined by...
Creating an Economy of Inclusion
The poor have been the main subject of concern in the whole tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. The Catholic Church talks often about a “preferential option for the poor.” In recent years, many of the Church’s social teaching documents have been particularly focused on the needs of the poorest people in the world’s poorest countries. The first major analysis of this topic could be said to have been in the papal encyclical Populorum Progressio, published in 1967 by Pope...
Lord Jonathan Sacks: The West’s Rabbi
In October 1798, the president of the United States wrote to officers of the Massachusetts militia, acknowledging a limitation of federal rule. “We have no government,” John Adams wrote, “armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, and revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.” The nation that Adams had helped to found would require the parts of the body...
Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church
Religion & Liberty: Volume 33, Number 4 Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church by Christopher Parr • October 30, 2023 Portrait of Charles Spurgeon by Alexander Melville (1885) Charles Spurgeon was a young, zealous 15-year-old boy when he came to faith in Christ. A letter to his mother at the time captures the enthusiasm of his newfound Christian faith: “Oh, how I wish that I could do something for Christ.” God granted that wish, as Spurgeon would e “the prince of...
Conversation Starters with … Anne Bradley
Anne Bradley is an Acton affiliate scholar, the vice president of academic affairs at The Fund for American Studies, and professor of economics at The Institute of World Politics. There’s much talk about mon good capitalism” these days, especially from the New Right. Is this long overdue, that a hyper-individualism be beaten back, or is it merely cover for increasing state control of the economy? Let me begin by saying that I hate “capitalism with adjectives” in general. This...
Jesus and Class Warfare
Plenty of Marxists have turned to the New Testament and the origins of Christianity. Memorable examples include the works of F.D. Maurice and Zhu Weizhi’s Jesus the Proletarian. After criticizing how so many translations of the New Testament soften Jesus’ teachings regarding material possessions, greed, and wealth, Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has gone so far to ask, “Are Christians supposed to be Communists?” In the Huffington Post, Dan Arel has even claimed that “Jesus was clearly a Marxist,...
How Dispensationalism Got Left Behind
Whether we like it or not, Americans, in one way or another, have all been indelibly shaped by dispensationalism. Such is the subtext of Daniel Hummel’s provocative telling of the rise and fall of dispensationalism in America. In a little less than 350 pages, Hummel traces how a relatively insignificant Irishman from the Plymouth Brethren, John Nelson Darby, prompted the proliferation of dispensational theology, especially its eschatology, or theology of the end times, among our ecclesiastical, cultural, and political...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2024 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved