Bøger af David Cayley

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, Cayleyfinds 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.

Ivan Illich alights on such topics as education, history, language, politics, and the church. The conversations range over the whole of Illich's published work and public career as a priest, vice-rector of a university, founder of the Centre for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and author of such classics as Tools for Conviviality, Medical Nemesis, and Deschooling Society.

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 comu- nes 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.