to unadulterated honesty, letting "their 'yea' be 'yea' and their 'nay' be 'nay,'"

may permit greater fluctuation in seeking after truths. As some

developmental theorists suggest, "the greater the truth commitment, the more

uncertain the commitment to other attitudes and opinions" since such a

commitment provides a dynamism leading to potential revision or overthrow.

"The ardent truth seeker shakes up comfortable presumptions, including those

of the truth seeker herself," say Anne Colby and William Damon, though they

add that not allother beliefs may be up for grabs, since "a core commitment of

honesty can coexist with other central articles of faith."¹⁹As pacifists who

only recently added "justice" to their vocabularies, Mennonites generally have

contented themselves with working at local levels at local issues, seeking to

serve and empower in scattered communities around the world rather than in

national power centers.²⁰They have rejected the notion of dismembered

individuals, unencumbered selves abstracted from particular formative

narratives, commitments, relationships and communities. Perhaps -- in a

bizarre form of postmodern salvation, just in the nick of time --

postmodernism may rescue Mennonites from fully embracing modernism.

And perhaps international education programs will appropriately school

Mennonite young people, and others who attend Goshen and similar colleges,

in the virtues and perspectives of their petites histoireswhile expediting their

19_{On this, see Anne Colby and William Damon, Some Do Care:Contemporary}
Lives of Moral Commitment(New York:The Free Press, 1992):77.

20_{As my own work has shown, in this century Mennonites have moved}
dramatically toward politicization, at least in the form of "speaking to the
powers."However, even this usually has been rooted in a quiet, credible
testimony to what international mission and service workers have observed
around the globe. See my Wise as Serpents, Innocent as Doves:American
Mennonites Engage Washington (Knoxville:The University of Tennessee
Press, 1996).

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