Geography and Worldview: A Christian Reconnaissance (The Calvin Center Series)

Co-published with the Calvin Center for Christian Scholarship (CLC), Geography and Worldview contains eight essays on the theme of geography and Christian worldview based on papers presented at a conference held at Calvin College in August 1996. The essays included are grouped to show the distinction between two approaches to Christian Scholarship. The first approach looks at the discipline of geography itself, and explores the work of geographers to determine their implicit beliefs about the world. For example, an essay by David Livingstone lays bare the persistent relevance of assumptions once derived from natural theology, and essays by David Ley, Iain Wallace and Janel Curry-Roper analyze the breakdown of postitivism and postmodernism in the current worldview in geography. The second approach begins outside geography and asks what consequences geographers' basic beliefs or fundamental notions have for geographic scholarship. Here, Gerda Hoekveld-Meijer explores the significance of externality fields and borders for geography, Gerard Hoekveld looks at the implications of a biblical understanding of citizenship on geography, and Henk Aay presents the impact of neo-Calvinism on geographic education in the Netherlands. Includes two maps.

Henk Aay is Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI. Sander Griffioen teaches in the Philosophy department at Free University, Amsterdam.