Word: dusen
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...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...
...asked if anyone would like to hear more about the conference before making up his mind, the silence became even stonier. Desperately, the seminarian asked if any boy would agree to receive promotional literature just in case someone might develop an interest, and at this point Class President Van Dusen spoke up. The result was that when Van Dusen turned up at Princeton the next year, the seminarian promptly recognized him and persuaded him to serve as assistant business manager of the next youth conference. In this casual way began the career of one of the great conferees of modern...
Islands of Inactivity. In Van Dusen's day at Princeton (it was also F. Scott Fitzgerald's day), the contemptuous tag for fellows like Pit was apt to be "Christ-er." Pit spent two summers as counselor at a Princeton-run camp for underprivileged children, and became so interested in social problems that he followed up some of the families during the school year. He joined a boycott of the undergraduate eating clubs, in a vain attempt to force them to offer membership to any and all upperclassmen. Exclusion, he maintained, was "undemocratic and un-Christian...
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...