HOLLAND - A new book that explores the history and development of Hope College's religious identity is intended not only for members of the Hope community but for all who care about Christianity and the academic enterprise, especially as they are embodied in American culture.

The book, "Can Hope Endure?: A Historical Case Study in Christian Higher Education," has been written by Dr. James C. Kennedy and Dr. Caroline J. Simon of the Hope College faculty and published in "The Historical Series of the Reformed Church in America" by the William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company of Grand Rapids and Cambridge, UK. Released at the end of January, the paperback volume sells for $28.

The two authors trace the way that Hope has defined, expressed and maintained its religious identity in light of both multiple traditions within the college itself and the broader context of U.S. culture. They carry the story from the college's chartering in 1866 through the end of the 1990s and even a bit beyond.

Kennedy and Simon contend that Hope has long wrestled with balancing three traditions in its religious identity. First, with the college affiliated since the beginning with the Reformed Church in America, Hope's heritage includes a Calvinist emphasis on intellectual inquiry as a way of understanding God. Next, also since its earliest days, Hope has been influenced by American evangelicalism, with an emphasis on personal piety and character. Third, the college is marked by a progressive ecumenism that calls for hospitality to a wide range of belief and opinion, a characteristic that has also found expression for more than a century.

The three qualities, they note, have waxed and waned in primacy relative to one another, but with a tendency in the long term toward what Kennedy and Simon call the "Middle Way." The origins of that term itself demonstrate the longevity of the process - it was coined by Hope's seventh president, Irwin J. Lubbers, some 50 years ago.

"Part of what I see, and this is a really optimistic reading, is that the college seems to operate like a gyroscope," said Simon, who is a professor of philosophy. "You can see it tilting, but you can also see a natural tendency to rebalance."

It was one such period of adjustment that prompted the two professors to write the book.

"There was big debate in the 1990s about what Hope College was and what Hope College ought to be," said Kennedy, who is a research fellow with the college's A.C. Van Raalte Institute and on leave in the Netherlands as an associate professor of history at Hope. "That was part of what drove us to an interest in the institution's past. We were engaged Hope faculty who wanted to know about the institution's history."

In part, they were motivated by the differing understandings they encountered concerning Hope's past.

"People tended to have rival oral traditions with regard to the college's history," Simon said. "I just wanted to know what the 'truth of the matter' was, as philosophers naively say."

Research for the book included extensive use of Hope-related materials in the Joint Archives of Holland, such as the minutes of committee meetings, college and student publications, and other documentation of Hope activities. The authors also interviewed many key past and present members of the Hope community, for which they even traveled as far as Florida, and had access to personal correspondence as well.

"You need to get as many points of view as you can, and then try to say what looks reliable," Simon said.

They found the administration remarkably supportive of their effort to produce an unvarnished overview of the topic.

"I think it took a certain amount of institutional courage for Hope to take a look at itself that didn't have the goal of flattering the institution," Simon said. "It says something important about the Hope College administration's respect for scholarship as such that they've allowed us access to materials that other institutions wouldn't have allowed people to look at."

"The administration has been really supportive," Kennedy said. "We've been very grateful that we were given room to write what we felt we have to write."

For their part, Kennedy and Simon worked with a balance of their own in mind.

"We tried to be respectful of the living and the dead," Kennedy said. "At that same time, we also tried to make this as frank and honest as possible."

What they found was a college that for most of its first century pursued its "Middle Way" in a largely conservative manner - an effect of the college's origins in ethnically Dutch, Midwestern Holland.

"One reason that the college remained relatively conservative for so long had a lot to do with the fact that it was in a traditionally minded ethnic enclave," Kennedy said. "The processes of Americanization were slower to make an impact on that ethnic enclave. The role of that ethnic character on the college is one of the issues that we explore."

The change was gradual, but especially following the postwar period Hope was in the mainstream in U.S. higher education in a variety of ways, "not least of all in its preponderant emphasis on academic excellence rather than faith commitment," noted Kennedy. In the 1960s, relatively strict requirements concerning the Christian faith in faculty hiring were relaxed to enable the college to pursue a broader range of candidates. Correspondingly, Kennedy and Simon note, less emphasis was placed on the college's religious heritage.

They stress that the college wasn't unique in that respect. Most colleges founded in the 19th century were church-related, yet for most, through a process of secularization, by the end of the 20th century those ties had faded, according to Kennedy and Simon.

Part of what has distinguished Hope, Kennedy and Simon feel, is that the college made a deliberate effort from the early 1970s to reassert its religious identity where many other institutions did not. And so, they say, began the trajectory that led to the tensions of the 1990s as the college community found itself encountering varied understandings of its nature and of the college's role as an institution of higher education.

Kennedy and Simon see continued need for discussion, even if the process isn't always easy. "We hope, among other things, the book will help the local community reflect on the strength of the changes that happened out of a recent period of controversy and also learn to deal better with controversy in the future," Simon said. "In my perspective, looking at church-related higher education, the most damaging thing that an institution can do is take its Christian identity for granted," Simon said.

"In a place as diverse as Hope, you have both the strength and the weakness of having multiple theological vocabularies and the danger of people not having the faintest idea of what other people are talking about," she said. "It can make it the case that it can take so much energy to have the conversation that many institutions stop having it."

"Where Hope College is now is where it's always been - having to negotiate the tension in how to continue to express who we are in a community that's diverse," Simon said.  "That's an issue any college that cares about its religious identity has to face."

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