A militant but nuanced strategic handbook on winning souls for Christ.
Indians living abroad are ripe for conversion to Christianity, according to this shrewd evangelical guide.
Pathickal (The Cross and the Cow Belt of India, 2011), a professor and pastor born in India, notes that while missionary work is difficult within India, some 50 million Hindus living abroad are accessible to Christian witnessing. Citing survey data he gathered among Hindus in New York, he argues that several factors make Indians abroad receptive to proselytizing: They tend to be well-educated professionals, open to new ideas and doubtful of traditional Hindu doctrine and the reach of Hindu gods; distance from the subcontinent weakens their ties to Hindu practice and culture; immigrant life and economic ambition can open a spiritual void that, he believes, only Jesus Christ can fill. Ideology can both help and hinder Christian proselytizers, he warns, and while Hindus have a positive impression of Jesus Christ and would readily include Him in their pantheon, they see little need to abandon other gods. They find the notion of the Trinity baffling, and they tend to associate Christianity with scientific and educational achievement but also with white colonialism and sexual permissiveness. Pathickal grounds his book with an engaging, sophisticated historical account of the Hindu religion, complete with profiles of the main deities and critiques of the doctrines of karma and rebirth from a Christian perspective. He offers extensive advice on winning over Hindus—e.g., proselytizers must live their Christianity through “friendship evangelism” before they preach it—and provides lengthy, somewhat stilted, scripted model conversations to guide witnessing encounters. He admonishes readers to show respect for Hindu beliefs, but his attitude isn’t ecumenical; he insists on the inerrancy of the Bible and the exclusive truth of fundamentalist Christianity, averring that “those who reject the claims of Christ will be cast into the lake of fire for all eternity.” Committed Hindus may find little common ground with Pathickal, but zealous Christians will glean doctrinal background, tactical tips and rhetorical maneuvers to support their efforts to convince waverers.
A militant but nuanced strategic handbook on winning souls for Christ.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1449750022
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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