Ivan Illich argues for individual personal control over life, the tools and energy we use. A work of seminal importance. The conviviality for which noted social philosopher Ivan Illich is arguing is one in which the individual's personal energies are under direct personal control and in which the use of tools is responsibly limited. A work of seminal importance, this book claims our attention for the urgency of its appeal, the stunning clarity of its logic and the overwhelmingly human note that it sounds.

This book offers the first biography of Catholic priest and radical social critic Ivan Illich, who skewered the institutions of the West in the 1970s.

"Each of the four essays printed here was written for a specific occasion and together comprise only the smallest selection from a larger corpus questioning commodity and energy-intensive economies. The essays are presented thematically instead of chronologically to offer a better view of the sweep of Illich's argument. In the first two, "War against Subsistence" and "Shadow Work," Illich reveals both the ruins on which the economy is built and the blindness of economics which cannot but fail to see it. The second two essays, "Energy and Equity" and "The Social Construction of Energy," unearth the nineteenth century invention and subsequent consequences of 'energy' thought of as the unseen cause of all 'work' whether done by steam engines, humans, or trees. The science of ecology relies on this assumption and, as Illich explained, unwittingly fuels the addiction to energy. The close dance of energy consumption and economic growth is characteristic of not just industrially geared societies. After all, energy consumption steadily increases even in so-called post-industrial societies, fueling the fortunes of Google and Apple no less than Wal-Mart"--

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.

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.