by Richard F. Young
The Spirit Catches
You and You Fall Down,
Anne Fadiman’s insightful book about Hmong refugees in
California and the struggles they experienced in comprehending
American medical mores, starts off with a remark that I have
found enormously interesting:
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| Richard
F. Young |
“I have always
felt,” she says, “that the action most worth watching is not
at the center of things but where edges meet.” Fadiman’s
fascination with being at the edges instead of the center is one
that I share. “I like shorelines,” she continues, “weather
fronts, international borders.” So do I, especially the borders,
having crossed a number during some twenty-two years in Asia, a
portion of that time as a missionary with the
Presbyterian Church (USA).
Although the in-between is never an easy place to be, Fadiman
would have us believe—and I concur—that the action at the
edges is worth watching because, “There are interesting
frictions and incongruities in these places, and often, if you
stand at the point of tangency, you can see both sides better than
if you were in the middle of either one.”
Edges meeting,
colliding, converging—for me, as a historian of religions, the
metaphor seems ideal not only for shorelines, weather fronts, and
international borders but also for religions that encounter each
other. It isn’t for everyone to situate themselves in-between,
there to observe the energies released, constructively and
destructively, when religions meet. But those who do can find a
keener sense of clarity about what matters most in Christianity by
learning to look at this religion from the point of tangency with
another (Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, etc.). It has been deeply
gratifying to find students at Princeton Seminary so centered in
their faith, so at ease with it that they are more than ready for
interreligious exploration at the edges, beyond the boundaries of
their respective traditions, believing that to do so would not
diminish but enrich their sense of who they are as Christians.
The predisposition for
being at the edges that Fadiman articulates so vividly is less new
to the Seminary than might at first seem the case. In a deep-time
perspective, it has exemplified the Princeton ethos from the very
beginning. One finds ample evidence of this in the Society of
Inquiry on Missions, a voluntary association organized and
sustained largely at student initiative in the Seminary’s early
years. After a busy first year of teaching, it has become a
delightful summertime diversion to immerse myself in the records
of this society, now kept in the Seminary’s archives. In sifting
through the remnants, a certain profile emerges: of students whose
quest for understanding the action on the edges led them into
correspondence with people on a variety of frontiers, first in
America itself (the hinterlands of New York, for instance, which
were being newly settled) and then, as missionaries were being
sent abroad, in virtually the whole world.
A goodly number of those
who went abroad were Princeton’s own. The first, to my
knowledge, was Henry Woodward (Class of 1818), who helped
establish in Jaffna (the peninsula at the northern tip of Sri
Lanka) a college for Tamil youth, education being quintessentially
a missionary endeavor. Having myself served at this same college
in the mid-1980s, I was deeply moved to find that the society kept
a “missionary box” in the Alexander Oratory, out of which
contributions were sent to Jaffna, underwriting the education of
the first cohort of Tamil students in 1824. That collaboration,
however, came at a price; poor Woodward must have burned the
midnight oil responding to inquiry after inquiry from the Society
of Inquiry. These were often ethnographic (Who, for instance, are
the Tamilians?) and indicative of the students’ social
background in American agricultural communities (What crops do the
Jaffnese grow?). But religion itself was always a focal point for
inquiry and, naturally enough, evangelical concern (Which gods do
the “Hindoos” worship, and why?). To satisfy these inquiries,
Woodward was hard-pressed, as were others. From every quarter of
the globe, letters to the society poured in, along with artifacts
from the field that were catalogued and kept under lock and key by
the “keeper of the cabinet,” a seminarian.
Continued
© Copyright 2001
Princeton Theological Seminary
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