David Cayley

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.

The Testament of Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich in Conversation

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.

An Intellectual Journey

Ivan Illich

Examines the life and writings of Roman Catholic Church reformer Ivan Illich (1926-2002) in the context of the wider field of cultural criticism that took shape in the 1960s and beyond.

The Ideas of René Girard

Northrop Frye

Northrop Frye discusses with David Cayley his life as a teacher and scholar, focusing on the university as "the engine room of society." This fascinating book concludes with Frye's thoughts on religion and his writings on the Bible.

Northrop Frye in Conversation

Historian Ramsay Cook called George Grant one of Canada's two most important political thinkers in the twentieth century. In these lively conversations, recorded not long before Grant's death, David Cayley explores with Grant the deep roots of his faith, his evolution as a thinker, and his views on the future of Canada.

George Grant in Conversation

Auteur prolifique, Northrop Frye (1912-1991) est généralement considéré comme le plus influent des critiques littéraires de langue anglaise de ce siècle. Un de ses plus célèbres ouvrages, Le grand code : la Bible et la littérature - une lecture biblique à travers sa projection sur la littérature occidentale - connaît, dès sa parution, un immense succès. La réputation internationale de Frye est surtout basée sur les grands concepts de théorie littéraire élaborée dans Anatomie de la critique (1957) et sur des études mémorables sur Blake puis sur Shakespeare. Enregistrés peu avant sa mort, ces entretiens offrent une occasion unique de découvrir les observations et les intuitions d'un grand penseur.

Entretiens avec Northrop Frye

Interviews broadcast on the How to think about science segment of the CBC radio show Ideas.

Ideas on the Nature of Science

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.

The Rivers North of the Future

Ivan Illich 

Pensador radical, polémico y polifacético que puso en duda las certezas producidas por las herramientas, sistemas e instituciones que dan fundamento a la Modernidad y el progreso, Iván Illich fue un iconoclasta para quien las instituciones modernas no representan ni el cumplimiento ni el rechazo del cristianismo, sino su perversión. Estaba convencido de que la civilización occidental sólo puede ser entendida cabalmente como una corrupción del Nuevo Testamento. En Los ríos al norte del futuro, Illich explora esta idea en sus conversaciones con David Cayley, a la luz de la máxima clásica que afirma que “la corrupción de lo mejor es lo peor”. Como observa Charles Taylor, “con su visión global y la penetrante precisión histórica de sus argumentos, Illich nos ofrece un nuevo mapa, un camino para llegar a entender, sin caer en los lugares comunes del anti-modernismo, lo que está en peligro debido a la forma tan descentrada, objetificante y desencarnada de rehacernos a nosotros mismos”. Su análisis de la sociedad contemporánea es tanto una hipótesis histórica y filosófica como una invitación a renovar nuestra comprensión del cristianismo.

David Cayley

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