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.

Bernie Lucht has been the executive producer of Ideas since 1984. He is also the executive producer of Tapestry, the Sunday afternoon program of religious and spiritual exploration. Born and raised in Montreal, he earned a BA from Concordia University in 1966. That same year, he joined the CBC as a producer for Radio-Canada International, and in 1969 went on to produce Cross-Country Checkup. Later that year, Lucht left for West Africa to work as a CUSO volunteer teacher in rural Nigeria. He returned to Canada in 1971, starting work as a production assistant at Ideas, then rising to become the program's executive producer in 1984. Under his direction, Ideas has won many national and international awards.

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Charles Taylor, professor emeritus at McGill University, is an internationally celebrated public philosopher who strives to bridge the gap between philosophical theories and political action. He is the author of many books, including Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989), in which he attempts to articulate and to write a history of the “modern identity.” He continued this theme in his 1991 Massey Lecture, “The Malaise of Modernity.” In 2003, he was the first recipient of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Gold Medal for Achievement in Research, in 2007 he won the Templeton Prize, and in June 2008 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in arts and philosophy. Charles Taylor is a Companion of the Order of Canada.

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