Theology: Parable from Prison

In 1943, Harvard-educated Langdon Gilkey, the son of a Baptist minister and an English teacher at Peking's Yenching University, was arrested by the Japanese and sent to a prison camp near Weihsien, in Shantung province. There he lived for 2½ years in the company of 1,500 other interned civilians, most of them British and American missionaries or traders. Out of his wartime experience, Gilkey, now a professor of theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School, has distilled a fascinating memoir called Shantung Compound (Harper & Row; $4.95) that is both a vivid diary of prison life and a...

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