Towards the end of the spring semester, Chimes announced that we would revamp our opinion section by starting new columns. We want to maintain our commitment to sustaining fresh content for these columns, so we have changed the categories to solicit increasingly diverse opinions. 

Firstly, we are proud to announce that Chimes will now be actively looking for political opinions for “The Knight’s Stand,” our new political column. These opinions should, in some way, be aimed at the Calvin community. All this means is the Calvin community, for whatever reason it may be, should care about said opinion. These conversations should be productive, think a little higher than your grandpa’s Facebook comments; we trust your submissions will meet these standards.

Secondly, and regretfully, we have decided to forgo our blog, “It’s Getting Hot in Here,” previously devoted to deliberating the anxieties surrounding global warming from a Calvin student perspective. We appreciate the dialogue this column created; however, the specificity of the blog made it too challenging for us to successfully and frequently solicit new opinions. This doesn’t mean we won’t accept op-eds related to climate change — we just can’t reliably provide readers with them regularly.

Thirdly, in an editorial last semester I mentioned that we were attempting to establish a column dedicated to the writings of our CPI campus. If you picked up Chimes last week (or in March), you may have noticed that these efforts have been successful. We anticipate difficulties regarding this column’s frequency, but because the dialogue of this corner of Calvin deserves to be heard by the rest of Calvin, we will organize all opinions from CPI students in our “CPI Corner.” 

Finally, the “Faith Perspectives” and “Let’s Talk About It” columns will remain largely the same. 

The objective of Faith Perspectives is to hear from, and more importantly, to listen to a variety of faith perspectives and traditions on issues important to those individuals. Likewise, “Let’s Talk About It” is devoted to critical conversation about all things related to sex and sexuality. This column, like all our column, is intended to inspire conversation, and so far, in its youthful career, has been successful; as many of you may remember, last year we had a few of these blogs galvanize responses from opposing views — an example of the type of dialogue we are trying to initiate. 

Our op-ed page has always been an important aspect to the Chimes mission, and we devote careful attention to it because we want each student to feel represented in Chimes. The op-ed page, perhaps more easily than traditional reporting, is one mechanism we use to accomplish this goal. These columns were established in our effort to solicit more opinions from non-regular Chimes writers, allowing for more voices to be heard. We hope to hear your voice.