Meets weekly online on Zoom
Start date: January 13, Wednesday, 7:45am (Eastern time)
Book: Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure
ISBN: 0–06-063112-0
Author: Dr. Langdon Gilkey
About the book
Langdon Gilkey was a young American teacher at Yenching University near Pekig, China, when the Japanese military under wartime press ion rounded up all foreigners into an internment camp. Shantung Compound is based on a journal Dr. Kilkey kept during his imprisonment. Along with Gilkey were nearly 2000 others, a cross-section of humanity, businessmen, families, lawyers, doctors, missionaries (including Eric Liddell, [Chariots of Fire] the gold medal winner of the 400 yr. dash in the 1924 Olympics), junkies, prostitutes, little children, the old and infirm – in all about 2000 people. You will read of the moral problems arising in this polyglot community, some shocking and responses often surprising during their 2 1/2 year ordeal.
Time Magazine wrote: The camp became a living laboratory, a miniature society that illustrated the human condition and moral dilemmas in a way that would not have been possible had more conventional conditions prevailed. Shantung Compound, is a “fascinating memoir that is both a vivid diary of prison life and a theologian’s mature reflection on the condition of man in times of stress.”
Special Guest:
Among the missionaries imprisoned was a mother and her three children from Norway . One of her children at the time was a teenager named Hakon. Today Hakon is 92 and he and his wife are living on an organic farm in Minnesota. They will be our special guests on January 29, noon Eastern, for a webinar and we will hear his first-hand account of the ordeal his family went through, the special relationship with Eric Liddell who became his surrogate father, and answer our questions.
For more information and link to the Zoom discussion please contact Dr. Paul Post at OSU: post.1@osu.edu. or Howard Van Cleave voice/text: 614-404-7076