Darrell Todd Maurina
2 min readApr 3, 2023

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Yep on Calvin being more diverse today. However, when I was there, there were almost no Korean undergraduates, though the seminary was about a quarter Korean.

From your LinkedIn profile we have something else in common -- tutoring a Korean. But in my case, I married her.

It won't take much digging to find that I'm a hard-right conservative, though not at all Dutch, and yes, I know that won't be the case with you. (I've known members of Church of the Servant all the way back to the early 1980s -- let's just say my church here in Missouri is very different. We started as a URCNA church plant though we weren't Dutch enough for the URC and ended up in a very conservative Southern Presbyterian denomination, the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church.)

Now with that piece of information, imagine what it was like when people at Calvin figured out I was dating one of the early female seminarians at Calvin Seminary? My wife became a clinical psychologist, not a pastor, but I think it's fair to say a lot of people were very surprised we even wanted to be friends and that she wanted me to tutor her in English. I think most people at Calvin finally decided that since we both were non-Dutch, we probably had more in common than either of us had with our fellow Dutch students.

Nice talking to a fellow Calvin grad. I almost never run into people from Calvin -- the Missouri Ozarks are not exactly a Dutch place -- and I don't think I've seen a Calvin graduate in person in a decade or more. This is a whole different world from Grand Rapids. We're best known to most Americans as the land of the "Winters Bone" movie and the "Ozark" show on Netflix -- some stereotypes of the rural South are really embarrassing but not entirely wrong.

Anyway, have a good day, and I hope you have a better experience with Duolingo's Spanish resources than I have had with its Korean resources.

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Darrell Todd Maurina
Darrell Todd Maurina

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