Ivan Illich (Urban Training Center Press) 125 Pages
In
the spring I was asking on Facebook for possible books around
Community Development. One of my colleagues sent me to a PDF link of
this (free) book. Free books are almost always worth the cost so....
Until
downloading this book I had never heard the name Ivan Ilich. Then he
ended up as one of the people discussed in the last book I read. So
as I was reading this I had to look him up and learn more about him.
It
was an interesting
piece. The book itself is a
selection of letters, papers and speeches from the 1960's. They
largely focus on Catholic mission work in Latin America but there are
insights that also fit a broader (and later in time) context. Indeed
in reading the first paper (which is the on the book is named for) I
was struck by how prescient Illich is in describing both the era of
his writing and the eras that followed.
Illich
does a good job of pushing the church-folk he is working with (or
possibly against?) to
consider seriously the context in which they act. He also pushes them
to consider seriously the ways in which their actions might actually
be damaging to the people with whom they are working. He challenges
the assumptions made about mission work and actively calls the church
to focus on the needs of the people.
In
the end, for my purposes anyway I found the first paper the most
useful. The others were interesting reading and had some good
insights but were a bit to narrowly focused for me.
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