I was, I suppose, an ethical humanist if I was anything." This despite being raised in an exhilarating atmosphere of theological (American Baptist) and political "liberalism" in Hyde Park, where his father was the first dean of the university's Rockefeller Chapel and his mother an equally prominent and successful early feminist.
In September 1939 while touring France with the Harvard-Yale tennis team, Gilkey saw the early manifestations of Hitler's Third Reich. Although he and his student generation detested Hitler, many detested war more. However, in the spring of 1940 something quite unpredictable happened. Gilkey went to the Harvard Chapel to hear a friend of his father, the noted Protestant neo-orthodox theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. He left that service "converted" to an entirely new view of the power struggles among nations; shortly leaving behind the optimistic illusions of his humanistic idealism.
A major turning point in Gilkey's life was his departure in mid-August 1940 for Peking to teach English to Chinese students at Yenching University. This experience in the Orient--he did not return to the United States for five years--was unquestionably the most significant and formative experience of his life.
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