Redeemer University recently received, by donation, the personal library of Dr. Cal Seerveld, an important figure in neo-Calvinist thought. Upon his passing, Seerveld’s art collection was donated to Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, IL and his extensive library to Redeemer. The donation catalyzed a project to develop a space that could house the collection, which has been named the H. Evan Runner Reading Room.
Seerveld was born in 1930 on Long Island. He held a bachelor of arts from Calvin University and master of arts in English literature and classics from the University of Michigan. He then completed his doctorate at the Free University in Amsterdam in philosophy and comparative literature. Seerveld helped establish and taught at Trinity Christian College in Illinois, and later moved to Canada to teach at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto. Recognized for his work in philosophical aesthetics, he published a significant number of essays and books, including Rainbows for the Fallen World: Aesthetic Life and Artistic Task.
It was rich! A boon for anyone interested in his thinking.
Before his death this past August, Seerveld had been searching for a good home for his personal library, when a connection between Seerveld and a library volunteer at Redeemer planted the seeds for making that home at Redeemer. Armen Svadjian, director of the Peter Turkstra Library at Redeemer, made a visit to Seerveld’s home in early 2024. Seerveld was looking for some assurance that the library and archival staff at Redeemer would do a good job of stewarding these valuable resources. Svadjian wanted to get a better sense of the materials that would make up the collection, and what he found was promising.
“There were many, many filing cabinets of personal papers, thousands of volumes reflecting his diverse scholarly interests–aesthetics, theology, philosophy, art history, Biblical studies. It was rich! A boon for anyone interested in his thinking,” says Svadjian. It was evident from the visit that Seerveld desired that his ideas be accessible to many.
One of the things that makes a personal collection interesting and valuable are the notes–or marginalia–made in books. Svadjian noted that he found plenty of this in Seerveld’s collection. “Crack open a book and there he was engaging with the author, having a rich conversation with him in the margin.”
Conversations with associate professor of religion and theology Dr. Jessica Joustra and archivist Brandon Swartzentruber around the value of the collection and the opportunity at hand, as well as generous donation from a keenly interested supporter, solidified the agreement to move ahead.
“We felt that with the right resources, initiative and enthusiasm, we could make this into something that would excite scholars around the world,” said Svadjian. The inherent research value of these resources is something that Redeemer staff and faculty are excited to take full advantage of. Svadjian and his team are making plans to engage scholars across disciplines, including Redeemer students through class visits, opportunities for students to curate displays, and an annual conference with papers based on the rich contents of the collection.
A 1,255 square foot space within the library was renovated, incorporating compact shelving and space for displays and study. The space has been named the H. Evan Runner Reading Room, after a neo-Calvinist academic who studied under Herman Dooyeweerd and who is known to have encouraged many students to enter the academy through his role as professor of philosophy at Calvin College from 1951 to 1981–including Seerveld.
The Seerveld collection includes letters to famous authors, correspondence with his students, lecture notes, written pieces from his youth, and drafts of hymns he wrote and composed for the 1987 Christian Reformed Church Psalter Hymnal. There are sermon manuscripts and plain-language translations of Psalms ripe with Seerveld’s idiosyncrasies. There are typewriters and fountain pens–he only ever wrote with fountain pens–as well as samples of his preferred brand of ink.
We felt that with the right resources, initiative and enthusiasm, we could make this into something that would excite scholars around the world.
Along with hundreds of books containing his personal notes in the margin, there are numerous papers with difficult-to-read handwriting. This challenge presented an opportunity for Swartzentruber to research and experiment with technology currently being used by other archivists in Canada and Europe. An artificial intelligence tool called Transkribus, will take scans of handwritten work and, through viewing many documents from the same writer, learn to translate what Seerveld’s handwriting says. Those scans, along with other digitized items, will be accessible to the public on a website currently under development.
“There will be some mistakes,” says Swartzentruber of the translation work, “but it will give people a huge headstart on being able to understand what he’s saying.”
Svadjian feels that this work of transcription would please Seerveld. “While he wanted to stand out in uniqueness and have style all his own, he also wanted to be down to earth and accessible. Cal seemed to be able to do both.”