Dr James Eglinton, the School of Divinity’s Meldrum Senior Lecturer in Reformed Theology, has been awarded a grant of $120,000 by the Abraham Kuyper Christian Leadership Fund for the two-year project, “Kuyper’s Encyclopaedia of Sacred Theology: Recovering a Lost Magnum Opus.” Dr James Eglinton Kuyper was a Dutch theologian and polymath who served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands at the start of the 20th century. His intended magnum opus was a three volume encyclopaedia of theology that was partially translated in English in the 1890s, but was then forgotten. In this project, I’ll be preparing the first complete critical English edition of the work. In our day, translation is increasingly outsourced to AI, which makes us naïve to the reality that translations are always interpretations. You learn a lot about a text by doing the hard work of translation for yourself. I’m thrilled that the Kuyper Fund is supporting a major human-led translation project like this, which will lead to a better understanding of the thought and life of a complex Christian intellectual. James Eglinton His work on the Encyclopaedia will begin following the completion of his current project, “Religious Experience and Multilingualism”—a three-year collaboration with the neuroscientist Professor Thomas Bak, which was awarded £198,000 by the John Templeton Foundation. Abraham Kuyper Christian Leadership Fund Thanks to a generous estate gift from the Rimmer and Ruth deVries family, the Abraham Kuyper Christian Leadership Fund has been established at Barnabas Foundation to advance the Reformed world and life view as taught and lived by Abraham Kuyper. Abraham Kuyper Christian Leadership Fund Publication date 20 May, 2026
