|
Showing 1 - 6 of
6 matches in All Departments
In The Rivers North of the Future David Cayley has compiled Ivan
Illich's moving and insightful thoughts concerning the fate of the
Christian Gospel. Illich's view, which could be summed up as "the
corruption of the best is the worst," is that Jesus' call to love
more abundantly became the basis for new forms of power in the
hands of those who organized and administered this New Testament.
Illich also explores the invention of technology, the road from
hospitality to the hospital, the criminalization of sin, the church
as the template of the modern state, and the death of nature.
Illich's analysis of contemporary society as a congealed and
corrupted Christianity is both a bold historical hypothesis and a
call to believers to re-invent the Christian church. With a
foreword by Charles Taylor. Ivan Illich (1926-2002) was a brilliant
polymath, an iconoclastic thinker, and a prolific writer. He was a
priest, vice-rector of a university, founder of the Centre for
Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and author of
numerous books, including Deschooling Society, Tools for
Conviviality, Energy and Equity, and Medical Nemesis.
In the eighteen years since Ivan Illich’s death, David Cayley has
been reflecting on the meaning of his friend and teacher’s life
and work. Now, in Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey, he presents
Illich’s body of thought, locating it in its own time and
retrieving its relevance for ours. Ivan Illich (1926–2002) was a
revolutionary figure in the Roman Catholic Church and in the wider
field of cultural criticism that began to take shape in the 1960s.
His advocacy of a new, de-clericalized church and his opposition to
American missionary programs in Latin America, which he saw as
reactionary and imperialist, brought him into conflict with the
Vatican and led him to withdraw from direct service to the church
in 1969. His institutional critiques of the 1970s, from Deschooling
Society to Medical Nemesis, promoted what he called institutional
or cultural revolution. The last twenty years of his life were
occupied with developing his theory of modernity as an extension of
church history. Ranging over every phase of Illich’s career and
meditating on each of his books, Cayley finds Illich to be as
relevant today as ever and more likely to be understood, now that
the many convergent crises he foresaw are in full public view and
the church that rejected him is paralyzed in its “folkloric”
shell. Not a conventional biography, though attentive to how Illich
lived, Cayley’s book is “continuing a conversation” with
Illich that will engage anyone who is interested in theology,
philosophy, history, and the Catholic Church.
For more than fifteen years, iconoclastic thinker Ivan Illich
refused to be interviewed. Finally, in 1988, CBC's David Cayley
persuaded Illich to record a conversation. This first interview led
to additional sessoins that continued until 1992 and are now
gathered in Ivan Illich in Conversation. In these fascinating
conversations, which range over a wide selection of the celebrated
thinker's published work and public career, Illich's brilliant mind
alights on topics of great contemporary interest, including
education, history, language, politics, and the church.
If science is neither cookery, nor angelic virtuosity, then what is
it? Modern societies have tended to take science for granted as a
way of knowing, ordering, and controlling the world, where
everything was subject to science, but science itself has largely
escaped scrutiny. In this fascinating collection of interviews, CBC
Radio's Ideas producer David Cayley talks to some of the world's
most provocative thinkers about how the ideas of science have
directed human thought and shaped human society. Contributors
include: Steven Shapin, Simon Schaffer, Margaret Lock, Arthur
Zajonc, Rupert Sheldrake, Sajay Samuel, Richard Lewontin, Ruth
Hubbard, Ulrich Beck, David Abram, and many others.
The Expanding Prison is a provocative, cogent argument for prison
reform. David Cayley argues that our overpopulated prisons are more
reflective of a society that is becoming increasingly polarized
than of an actual surge in crime. This book considers proven
alternatives to imprisonment that emphasize settlement-oriented
techniques over punishment, and move us towards a vision of justice
as peace making rather than one of vengeance.
|
|