Dr. James Herrick of the Hope College faculty has received the 12th annual "Favorite Faculty/Staff Member" award presented by the student body.
Herrick received the award on Saturday, Oct. 6, during halftime of the college's Homecoming football game at Holland Municipal Stadium.
Recipients of the "Favorite Faculty/Staff Member" award are chosen through a vote open to the entire student body and conducted at the same time as elections for the Homecoming court and king and queen. The students are not provided with a list of candidates for the award, but rather are asked to write in the name of the person that they feel should be honored. The award was first presented in 1996.
Herrick is the Guy Vander Jagt Professor of Communication at Hope, where he has taught since 1984. His research and teaching specialties are rhetoric and argumentation.
He is serving as acting chair of the department of communication during the current school year and also chaired the department in the past. He is a member of the planning committee for the college's biennial Veritas Forum and until recently was advisor of the college's chapter of the Lambda Pi Eta National Communication Honor Society, and has served on a variety of the college's other committees and boards.
Herrick delivered the address during the opening convocation at Hope in 1994. In January 2007 he received a "Ruth and John Reed Faculty Achievement Award," presented by the college's provost's office to members of the faculty who are superior teachers and have also contributed significantly in some other area of professional life.
During the spring semester of 2004 he taught at Lithuania Christian College in Klaipeda, Lithuania, and he visited the college again this past summer.
Herrick has had five books published: "The Making of the New Spirituality: The Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition," "The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists: The Discourse of Skepticism, 1680-1750," "The History and Theory of Rhetoric: An Introduction," "Argumentation: Understanding and Shaping Arguments," and "Critical Thinking: The Analysis of Arguments." The most recent of his books, "The Making of the New Spirituality," was named a 2004 "Gold Medallion Book Award Finalist" by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association and was cited as one of "Ten Books Every Preacher Should Read" in "Preaching" magazine's 2004 survey of the year's best books for preachers. A sixth book, "Scientific Mythologies: How Science and Science Fiction Forge Religious Belief," will be published by InterVarsity Press in February.
He has also had numerous articles appear in scholarly and popular publications in addition to presenting several papers at professional conventions, and wrote entries for both the "New Dictionary of National Biography" and "The International Encyclopedia of Censorship."
Herrick is an active member of the National Communication Association. His extensive professional involvement includes having served as a founding member of the editorial boards of three professional journals: "Review of Communication," which is the electronic journal of the National Communication Association; the Baylor University Press Rhetoric and Religion series; and, most recently, the "American Communication Journal."
He is a past recipient of research awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, and was recognized for excellence in teaching by the GraduateSchool of the University of Wisconsin.
Herrick holds his bachelor's degree from California State University. He received his M.A. from the University of California, and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.