Word: dusen
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...square blocks of Manhattan's Morningside Heights enclosed by Union's grey Gothic buildings, Pit Van Dusen lives the fragmented and busy life of a corporation president, multiple board member, personal counselor and theologian. His day begins in his sunny, comfortable, ten-room apartment at 7:15 with a hot (then cold) shower, and ends there around midnight with a bedtime glass of ginger ale and milk. The period between is a hectic but orderly scramble of board meetings (he is a trustee of ten educational institutions, plus the Rockefeller Foundation and the General Education Board), lectures, student...
Official dinners bore him; he accepts no more than three or four such invitations a year. The nearest thing to real relaxation for Van Dusen comes in the summer, when he takes about six weeks off to spend with his wife and three college-age boys at his country place at Sorrento, Me. Even here, he spends at least three hours a day studying and writing in a remote and tiny cabin named Seclusion, where he has written most of his twelve books and countless articles. (His wife has a similar cabin. Its name: Solitude...
Glory & Despair. Van Dusen's biggest job at nondenominational Union has been reorganizing the seminary to meet the doubled postwar enrollment, plus the influx of students' wives. He rearranged housing facilities, started a program by which churches would finance Union students from their own budgets, increased the number of foreign fellows from about 20 to 64 this year, and upped the budget from roughly $500,000 to $1,100,000. Union has come a long way from that December day in 1836 when the seminary first opened its doors to 13 students who wanted, as the preamble...
...Dusen himself has been something of an upstream swimmer against the intellectual current prevailing at the seminary during the past two decades. These have been the "neo-orthodox" years of theological through-the-looking-glass, when the wildest radicals were the most Biblically conservative, and the mark of old fuddy-duddyism was a relaxed attitude toward dogma. Students jampack the classes of Reinhold Niebuhr to hear that man is not good and never will be, and that humans must be content to strive for conditional and imperfect ends...
...these he added a third proposition, and its fuller development indicated that it was Van Dusen's own. This view "does not deny the possibility of Christ's return to end history. But it does not believe this expectation to be an essential element in Christian hope for the world, and for at least two reasons. It points to the indubitable fact that the early church anticipated the imminent return of Christ and that that expectation was not fulfilled...