BOOK REVIEW - Feb. 15th, 2008 08:33 am, by frumiousb

I would be willing to bet that many of you have old books that come from your parents or grandparents sitting around that you have never read. I have a bunch of those, and every once in a while I take one out and decide to read it.

Village Work in India is part travel writing, part missionary writing. It tells about efforts of the writers to create a Christian community in British India. It isn't a very challenging book. Considering the age and the subject, it is also (relatively) inoffensive.

What was interesting for me was that the writer showed a reasonably high degree of self-awareness about the ethical uncertainty of their actions. He acknowledged the high level of Indian culture, and expressed their own unease at interfering in a civilization that had so much history. The logic for why they were needed goes like this: He argued that the caste system had degraded the lower castes to the point where they were incapable of coming to salvation from within the country's religion. He seemed to feel that it was possible for non-Christians to be saved, but not in situations where poverty and lack of education had caused people to revert to simple animism. Since the country's religion supported caste, they argued that the situation would have no possibility to reform on their own.

They must have been from a relatively liberal church (it is not specified from which variety of Christianity they come) because they also spend an awful lot of time on the rights of Women, particularly for a book written in 1902.

The descriptions of India were relatively interesting, but the writer left his own views of spirituality opaque, more about being a missionary than anything else. But still worth the time to finally read. I believe that this came from my grandmother's collection.

Source: http://frumiousb.dreamwidth.org/387026.html