Word: dusen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Dusen was a young man of his time. The very word church, he wrote later, evoked "two vivid pictures, each heavily charged with repellent associations. First, large numbers of great, dark, often ugly, almost always locked, unused buildings set down at some of the busiest and most valuable corners of the world's life while quick and fascinating currents of thought and life surged around and past them . . . islands of slumbering inactivity amidst the urgent flow of public affairs . . . Second, two particular churches where [I] sat on under dull, mournful, interminable preaching by two elderly gentlemen in funereal black...
Undergraduate Van Dusen captained the Debating Team, headed the Undergraduate Council, the Bric-a-Brac and the International Polity Club, was valedictorian, Ivy Orator, Phi Beta Kappa, and an active member of the Student Christian Association. But for all sober purpose about him, Pit Van Dusen, when he graduated in 1919, still did not know what he wanted to do. The law, of course, beckoned, "but something made me hold back from it." He toyed with the idea of being a social worker, "although it was, and is, primarily a woman's field." His approach to the ministry...
...surprising that Van Dusen hesitated to take the plunge. The Student Christian Association asked him to stay on for a couple of years as graduate secretary, and he accepted. During those two years, there came to Princeton an odd, owl-faced man with a quiet voice and a burning desire to get young people to "change," to "get right with God" in group confession and accept the daily guidance of the divine. Frank Buchman, whose "Oxford Group" later became Moral Re-Armament and mushroomed into the best-financed and most-discussed evangelistic enterprise...
...Dusen turned for advice to the greatest Presbyterian preacher and pastor of his time, Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin. Coffin advised him to do what he himself had done: study for a year at Edinburgh, then return for the rest of his training at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan. Van Dusen agreed, and thereupon began walking in Dr. Coffin's footsteps...
...managed to find time for some mild social life in Edinburgh; at one party he met Elizabeth Bartholomew of the Scottish mapmaking Bartholomews, whom he married in 1931 when he went back to Edinburgh for his Ph.D. But relaxation, social or otherwise, is not one of Pit Van Dusen's talents. Once, when his friend Erdman Harris and another classmate with some extra cash planned to visit Rome for a splurge during a winter recess, 23-year-old Van Dusen heard about it and quickly revised the plans...