It is Denise Ackermann's work towards the humanity of all which prompted this particular collection of essays in her honour. The idea of honouring Denise with a Festschrift for her 70th birthday was first discussed in 2005 among members of the Cape Town Chapter of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians who met at Denise's home at the time. Editors

What does it mean to be Reformed Christians in the world today - and in Africa and South Africa? What does it mean to commemorate the legacy of John Calvin (1509-1564) after 500 years - in a modern world characterised by democracy, by popular notions of human dignity and human rights, by worldwide struggles for individual freedoms and for social justice, by a global economy in crisis - when social historians argue about the lasting contribution of Calvin and his followers precisely with respect to all these modern phenomena? What does it mean to be a Reformed church today - for its faith and confession, its worship and life, its witness and service - in ecumenical contexts and pluralist societies, in the face of the realities of suffering and threat? The 28 essays selected for this volume deal with such questions.

In the usage of present-day statistics 'statistical inference' is a profoundly ambiguous expression. In some literature a statistical inference is a 'decision made under risk', in other literature it is 'a conclusion drawn from given data', and most of the literature displays no awareness that the two meanings might be different.

This book concerns the problem of drawing conclusions from given data, in which respect we have to ask: Does there exist a need for the term 'statistical inference'? If so, does there also exist a corresponding need for every other science? If so, how does, for example, agronomy then manage to reason in terms of botanical inference, soil scientific inference, meteorological inference, biochemical inference, molecular biological inference, entomological inference, plant pathological inference, etc. without incoherence or self-contradiction? Consider the possibility that agronomy does not reason in terms of such a motley of special kinds of inference. Consider the possibility that, apart from subject matter, botany, soil science, entomology, etc. all employ the same kind of reasoning. If so, must we then believe that statistics, alone among all the sciences, is the only one that requires its own special kind of inference?