6. As part of their international education programs, church-related

colleges may need to give special attention to the issue of cultural relativism.

In some ways, perhaps ironically, programs like SST help balance a relativist

position students may develop in college when they are initially exposed to

new ideas. In "Confessions of a Former Cultural Relativist," Henry Bagish

identifies several behaviors he cannot accept as "just different," including the

Danzi of New Guinea's practice of chopping off young girls' fingers to placate

certain ghosts; exterminating Jewish people, as in the Nazi holocaust; and

ritual clitoridectomies, which still take place in some African and Arab

countries. While most study-abroad students do not encounter such extreme

practices, they frequently wrestle with machismo and other forms of sexism;

with the excessively harsh treatment of children, which sometimes would be

classified as abuse in the U.S.; and with the arrogance of the wealthy or

powerful in more highly stratified societies.⁶⁶On campus and in

international study, church-related colleges and universities need not seek to

remove their charges' religious and moral foundations. The embrace of

postmodernism is, after all, a one-armed one.

After the first full year of Goshen College's Study-Service Term

program, a four-person commission of international-education experts

evaluated the program. Among their conclusions was that SST led to

"broadened views, tolerance, cultural perspectives and more liberal or

humanistic values."The students' morals, the commission said, were "usually

66_{This listing, which corresponds with observations made by many SSTers, can}
be found in Althen, "Recurring Issues in Intercultural Communication," in
Althen, ed., Learning Across Cultures, 188. Althen also cites the Bagish
statement from a presentation at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

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