Archives: News Stories

Trinity Christian College is pleased to announce Courtney Kalous ’17 has been named this year’s Lincoln Laureate. Kalous will be recognized at the Student Laureate Convocation ceremony on Nov. 12 in Springfield, Ill. “I was overwhelmed to learn I’d been selected,” said Kalous, who is majoring in communications.

The Lincoln Academy’s Abraham Lincoln Civic Engagement Awards are presented for excellence in curricular and extracurricular activities to seniors from each of the state’s four-year, degree-granting colleges and universities, and one student from the community colleges in Illinois. Kalous was selected by Trinity’s Lincoln Laureate committee, which includes faculty, staff, administrators, and students.

“She was selected, on the basis of recommendations from different parts of the campus, because of her stellar academic record, her hearty involvement in campus leadership, and her abilities as a speaker,” said Dr. Craig Mattson, professor of communication arts.

A native of Menomonee Falls, Wis., Kalous is involved with the Student Association, Outcry, and serves as a tour guide for admissions. She also ran track for two years at Trinity.

Kalous said when she initially visited Trinity in high school, she thought the campus might be too small. “But the size of Trinity allows you to find your place,” she said. “You’re not just a face or name in the back of a lecture hall with 300 other students. I’ve felt a real sense of encouragement here.”

Kalous joins a distinguished group of Trinity students as Lincoln Laureates.

Trinity Christian College Lincoln Laureates

2016 – Courtney Kalous
2015 – Hallie Wisse
2014 – David (Woody) Lucas
2013 – Megan Anderson
2012 – Adam Perez
2011 – Alberto LaRosa
2010 – Joseph Wydra
2009 – Jon Vander Woude
2008 – Caitlin Fillmore
2007 – Elizabeth VanderSpek
2006 – Allison Backous
2005 – Erin Marshalek
2004 – Rachel Van Oort
2003 – Yvana Hansen
2002 – Evan VanderZee
2001 – Nate Bosch
2000 – Laurie Johnson
1999 – Hanna Vancer Zee
1998 – Kristen Devine
1997 – Heidi Boeck
1996 – Julie Tinklenberg
1995 – Keri Dyksterhouse
1994 – Mark Mulder
1993 – Kristen Hart
1992 – Sarah Ver Velde
1991 – Aron Reppmann
1990 – Nathan Van Der Male
1989 – Drew Sweetman
1988 – Erik Hoekstra
1987 – Kimberly Dykema
1986 – Edward Wiener, Jr.

–by Casey Huisenga ’18

Trinity’s Student Association has joined forces again with Illiana Christian High School and Chicago Christian High School for the 2^nd Annual Community Dodgeball Tournament, which begins on Nov. 4! Like last year’s event, this year’s tournament will raise money for the Empowerment Fund, which encourages community outreach and hopes to empower students in the future wherever they have a need.

This year’s recipient is Abby Neibert, a senior at Illiana. Neibert discovered she had osteosarcoma, a rare bone disease, this past August after having pain in her knee for some time. “It’s great to have support from the community,” she said. Unfortunately, due to chemotherapy and surgery on her knee, she will be unable to attend the tournament.

Last year’s dodgeball tournament was held in support of Trinity student Katie Vree ‘17, who was in need of a standing wheelchair. This cause inspired the creation of the Empowerment Fund. In total, $25,000 was raised from last year’s tournament. Vree received the wheelchair in May 2016.

You won’t want to miss this event! Join the cause and get a team of six together, whether you’re a student, parent, alumni, or friend of any of the schools. Student teams are $30 each and adult teams are $60. Register at Trinity’s Fall Fest site. Registration has been extended until Thursday, Nov. 3.

Dodgeball Tournament Schedule

• Trinity Christian College – November 4
• Chicago Christian High School – November 4
• Illiana Christian High School – November 11
• Championship Tournament at Trinity – November 18

Homecoming and Family Weekend are one BIG weekend. These are THE days for families and alumni to visit campus. Plan to join us November 4 & 5 for a weekend of fun for everyone.

#fallfest2016 Schedule of Events

Friday, November 4

Saturday, November 5

Trinity’s Student Association team for the 2016 – 2017 academic year is focused on taking action and encouraging positive change on campus through communication and involvement within the student body.

The executives this year defined Student Association as students serving students. While a simple concept, this embodies a deep desire to transform Trinity’s campus for the better of the students, staff, faculty, and the community as a whole.

Student Association president Jordan Ghiglia ’17, is determined to address practical and meaningful change, “We have been working on emphasizing that ‘service’ part much more this year than in years past. I think that anyone who sees an issue on campus but does nothing to be a part of the process to fix that issue is not only robbing the community, but robbing themselves of the experience of helping others.”

This year, the team is already delegating committees to assist in organizing events like the annual Community Dodgeball Tournament, Fall Fest, and OPUS. The student representation in these activities demonstrates SA’s hope to become a stronger presence on campus.

There are also meetings regarding department curriculum, foundations courses, and other academically focused discussions that the representatives have joined to increase the value of students’ voices, concerns, and opinions. Vice President of Administration Liz Boss ’18 says she looks forward to the association making a larger presence on campus than previous years.

“I’m really looking forward to Student Association this year and the impact we can have on campus through various conversations, events, and objectives,” said Junior Representative Casey Huisenga ’18. “As the student body, we have the largest and most important voices on campus that desire to be heard.”

–By Faith Lorenz ’17

If you never thought that attending an anime convention would be a requirement for an English class, then you haven’t read the syllabus for English 356: Manga and Anime.

On Sept. 23-25, Trinity students from this unique cross-cultural studies (CCS) class trooped out to the Radisson Holiday Star Plaza in Merrillville, Ind., to attend Ramencon 2016, a convention where anime fans gather to share their mutual love for the genre through panels, screenings, and cosplay. With all the gaming, vendors, autographs, artists, and photo ops available, Ramencon is a condensed experience of Japanese visual culture that asks students to stretch their normal modes of thinking.

Dr. Mark Jones, professor of English and a self-proclaimed fan of anime and manga as well as their cons, started this class in 2012 as an addition to the Trinity Honors Program. But interest in the class spread quickly. What began as a first-year writing class is now an upper-level literature class open to all interested students regardless of year or major.

As part of the foundational CCS courses, the goal of the class is getting students to engage with narrative across different cultures and various media, and it seems to be doing just that. “Classroom discussions are always rich and full of insight from students,” said Jones. “Sometimes I find it hard to know when I should start talking again.”

Ramencon won’t be the class’s only expedition. Next on the docket is a trip to the Japanese-American commercial center Mitsuwa Marketplace in Arlington Heights, Ill., where students will immerse themselves in a pocket of Japanese culture with a wide selection of Japanese food, fashion, and clientele. “Part of the responsibility of teaching a course like this is to find ways for students not only to pursue the study of other cultures, but to engage meaningfully with members of other cultures,” said Jones. “That’s one reason why the experience outside the classroom is so important.”

Four Trinity alumni recently published a scientific paper based on work and research they began during their time at the College. Derek Frejd ’16, Kiera Dunnaway ’14, Jennifer Hill ’12, and Jesse Van Maanen ’12, along with Dr. Clay Carlson, associate professor of biology, co-authored “The Genomic and Morphological Effects of Bisphenol A on Arabidopsis thaliana,” which appeared in the journal PLOS One.

According to Carlson, the work was started by Hill and Van Maanen in a Genetics course during the spring of 2012 and then completed by Frejd and Dunnaway, who received Vander Velde Research Scholarships for their work.

The paper explores the effect that environmental toxin bisphenol A (BPA) has on the plant known by its scientific name Arabidopsis thaliana or more common name thale cress. “I came into it primarily as an ecologist, so I didn’t want to end up doing a project that felt very abstract or purely molecular,” said Hill, who was a Founders’ Scholar at Trinity. “Dr. Carlson suggested the beginnings of this study because environmental pollutants affecting plants was something I could get much more excited about.”

Hill and Van Maanen, who is doing his residency at Sanford School for Medicine at the University of South Dakota, designed the parameters of the original project and began growing the plant under different conditions. “We found that BPA was disrupting the plants’ ability to respond to normal hormonal signals, which can hinder their flowering and proper development,” she said. Hill and Van Maanen received results just in time for OPUS, but they could only do a preliminary analysis before graduation.

Frejd and Dunnaway took up the project and conducted more experiments to confirm and expand the original findings. Dunnaway, who is currently attending Veterinary School at Ross University, first presented her work at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research (NCUR) in 2014. Frejd presented his work at the same conference in April 2016.

Carlson’s genetics class ended up being formative for Hill. “Not just because the research resulted in my first scientific publication–although I’m so elated that it did. It was also the first time I was exposed to genetics in a way that made me feel excited and curious,” she said. “I realized that most of the ecological questions I was interested in could be best addressed using genetic techniques.”

That led her to receive a master’s degree in ecological genetics at Western Washington University. Currently, she is working on her Ph.D. at the University of New Hampshire.

Movies are many things—escapist experiences, historical artifacts, business ventures, and artistic expressions. Movies are also prayers, according to Josh Larsen ’96, guest lecturer for the 2016 Freshmen Lecture, which took place Oct. 3 in Ozinga Chapel Auditorium. “What might movies say to God?” Larsen, editor of Think Christian, asked the audience. “Those who are not Christians do pray, although their prayers are different than how Christians pray.”

Using clips from movies as diverse as “Toy Story” and “Godzilla: King of the Monsters!” Larsen outlined categories of prayer that movies can fall into such as lamentation, yearning, joy, and confession. For example, he pointed to many science fiction films like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” as a type of yearning prayer. “Why bother to yearn, if there is no object to yearn to?” he asked.

Before joining Think Christian in 2011, Larsen spent 16 years in the newspaper business and served as a film critic for Chicago-based Sun-Times Media. The co-host of Filmspotting, Larsen’s first book, Movies Are Prayers, is scheduled to be published next spring.

The Freshmen Lecture began with a greeting and prayer from Dr. Karen Dieleman, English department chair.

The annual Freshman Lecture enriches the core experience for freshmen by engaging them in a challenging but enjoyable learning opportunity outside the classroom setting. Though organized by the English department and contextualized in the Composition or Introduction to Literature classroom, the Freshman Lecture aims to be interdisciplinary and perspectival. It offers listeners new avenues of reflection on such topics as cultural engagement, learning, communication, and personhood.

Students. Authors. Thanks to their experiences in Trinity’s English classes, several students and recent alumni have seen their worked developed into a blog, Getting to Know Us: Our Foods, Our Cultures, and a book, Voices of Redemption, that has recently been released in an electronic version.

Getting to Know Us was written in English 103 last fall, according to Dr. Michael Vander Weele ’73, professor of English. The essays, currently available online, feature recipes, reflections, and photos by students.

Getting to Know Us was inspired by Nina Mukerjee Furstena’s Biting through the Skin: An Indian Kitchen in America’s Heartland. “I liked the idea of a first-semester student having to contact a parent or grandparent for a recipe and realized that writing about diverse foods could also lead us to appreciate diverse cultures,” Vander Weele said.

The students’ first drafts focused on capturing a recipe and an occasion. “It became more difficult, by draft three, to include the cultural aspect of food. The first essay to do so really made us sit up and listen,” he said. “As a class, we suddenly knew that not only would it be possible but also valuable–and interesting. The second step was when I knew that more than half of the class’s essays could bear the weight of public notice and be both important and enjoyable for a larger public. Then the editing process, by both students and me, got serious,” he said.

According to Vander Weele, the essays in the blog and the book went through multiple rounds of edits.

Bethany (Kerr) Eizenga ’11 and Monica Brands ’11, wrote Voices of Redemption. Originally published in 2012, it was recently released as an e-book. The book began as an English internship and evolved into a series of shaped interviews. It tells the personal stories of some of the people served by Roseland Christian Ministries and Roseland Christian Reformed Church in Chicago.

Vander Weele served as the publisher for the books. Graphic designer (and Vander Weele’s son in law) Schuyler Roozeboom ’04 created the cover, along with the publishing company for the book. Vander Weele is now the publisher for the company, Publishing for Community.

The Voices of Redemption eBook is available in several electronic formats. Hard copies are also available at the Bootsma Bookstore Café:

• iBooks Store – for iBooks on iPad, iPhone and Mac
• Kindle Store – for Kindle devices and Kindle app
• Barnes & Noble – for Nook devices and Nook app

Moving up five spots from 2016, Trinity Christian College has been ranked 19^th among Regional Colleges—Midwest by U.S. News & World Report in “Best Colleges” for 2017.

The annual report ranked 1,374 colleges and universities across a range of categories, including regional liberal arts colleges and national universities and liberal arts colleges. Across the entire Regional category, 334 colleges are ranked in this year’s survey.

“Trinity Christian College provides a rigorous and relevant education, one that embraces both the liberal arts and professional preparation,” said President Kurt D. Dykstra, J.D. “We are pleased that a Trinity education has been recognized once again by U.S. News & World Report.”

The U.S. News rankings are based on qualitative and quantitative information in several categories, including peer and counselor assessment, graduation and retention rates, faculty resources, student selectivity, financial resources, and alumni giving.

Trinity stands among other institutions in the Regional Colleges category that offer a wide range of degree programs in the liberal arts and in fields such as business, education, and nursing.

Each year the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) recognizes excellence in character-driven intercollegiate athletics programs with the Champions of Character Five-Star Institution award. Trinity was among the 171 NAIA institutions that received the Five-Star designation for 2015-16.

The Five-Star award is a part of the NAIA’s Champions of Character initiative that measures each institution’s commitment to the five core values of character training, conduct in competition, academic focus, character recognition, and character promotion.  Institutions also earn points based on exceptional student-athlete grade point averages and by having minimal to no ejections during competition throughout the course of the academic year. Based on the scorecard system, Trinity received the Bronze award.

Throughout the 2015-16 school year Trinity’s athletics program was involved in various activities that promoted the Champions of Character values. Coaches and student-athletes received training in and promoted Christ-like conduct on and off the playing field. Teams participated in outreach activities such as conducting clinics and camps, organizing food drives, promoting cancer awareness events, participating in community service projects, and serving the underprivileged. In addition the teams were academically focused and maintained a high grade point average.

For more information and a complete list of Five-Star institutions visit: www.naia.org.