she noted later in her journal. Her corner on the truth was now shared with

other truths, and she was humbled in the process.⁵¹

From the earliest days of SST, the vision for the international education

program was that students would be in dialogue with people of other religions.

When SST began, most Mennonite students came to the college from rural

Mennonite communities, where in the 1960s "ecumenical" meant Mennonites,

Methodists and perhaps Baptists living together in relative peace. Today

Mennonites are more urbanized, though for most undergraduates at Goshen

College, Mennonite and other-than-Mennonite, contact with other religions is

still limited prior to their arrival on campus. In Haiti and Dominican Republic

students see voodooism and its syncretistic blend with Catholicism firsthand; in

China students encounter atheism, agnosticism and Buddhism; in Costa Rica

and elsewhere in Latin America students experience Pentecostalism and

Evangelicalism with an intensity they've not witnessed in North America; in

Côte d'Ivoire they see wide-ranging African religions, some mixed with

Christian rituals; in Indonesia they experience Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism;

in many settings they have contact with indigenous forms of Mennonitism,

some of which look considerably different than what they have known from

their home communities. As students worship with their host families in

whatever faith is theirs, or avoid organized religion altogether if that is their

family's practice, they learn to both critique and value their religious

heritage, and also to broaden their views of faith and faithfulness. Already in

1971 one analysis of SST said returning students reported "more tolerance

toward religions and a greater understanding of the catholicity of the

51_{The story again is from our Summer 1997 SST group in Dominican Republic.}

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