Below is a clickable list of many of David Cayley’s Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) about 50-minute-long podcasts. They were presented between 1980 and 2012, the latter date when he retired.
Who is David Cayley? To quote theologian Brad Jersak, Clarion Journal‘s curator: I think he’s truly among Canada’s greatest thinkers. Few who know his work would take issue with Brad’s assessment.
An expanded list of Cayley’s Works is to be found on his website here. The list includes the podcasts itemized, but is not clickable. I will encourage David, whom I’ve happily known since the early 1990s, to make everything clickable.
David possesses a rare ability to make some of the most convoluted yet brilliant thinkers understandable! He does that invariably with all whom he interviews. His mellifluous tones and straightforward arrangement of interview material on his broadcasts beguile that a “Renaissance Man” is at work. (He would likely laugh at such a view–then point to any number of whom he thinks are/were such. And what do I know? 🙂 )
Indeed: every person or subject Cayley turns broadcast/written attention to is elevated for all willing to be taken on a grand “intellectual journey.” But he is a broadcaster, not an academic of the sort who writes mainly for his/her own peers or in his/her circumscribed field. His range of inquiry is astounding. For instance:
His 24 hours of broadcasts on How To Think About Science, is fascinating throughout. Cayley interviewed many of the top philosophers of science in the world. (Yes, I listened to them all.) You may also read his subsequent book: Ideas on the Nature of Science. Though it does not include everything from the series. The full transcript may be found on Cayley’s website, and here.
His five-part series on The Scapegoat: The Ideas of René Girard, developed not only a friendship between them, but Girard said upon listening to the series that it was to his mind the finest summation of his thought he had heard or read. If you visit The Colloquium on Violence and Religion website, you will find a vast array of scholars interacting and publishing about Girard on a wide spectrum of academic inquiry. So that statement points to no small accomplishment! (Incidentally, there is also much on this website about René Girard.)
In my area of career interest, he did a 10-part series: Prison and Its Alternatives. It too developed into a book: The Expanding Prison: The Crisis in Crime and Punishment and the Search for Alternatives. (Yes, I also listened to them all.) A Canadian criminologist at the time, noted for her Restorative Justice work, Liz Elliott, told me there was nothing finer in the Restorative Justice Field. I agreed. (And no doubt something akin could be said of his work in many fields he probed.)
All Cayley’s books had their genesis in his broadcasts. His latest on Illich is only in part an exception.
Cayley comes out of the Anglican tradition. I told him a few times over the years that he should be made a “Doctor of the Church.” He always laughed, and said that would indeed have made his parents happy . . . Then it happened in 2010, when he received an Honorary Doctorate in Sacred Letters from Thornloe University, an Anglican Church of Canada affiliated institution.
Finally, go also for sure to his website, where you may browse and linger to your heart’s content! It is introduced by him thus:
For more than thirty years (1980-2012) I made radio documentaries for CBC Radio’s Ideas series. The most recent of the more than 250 programmes remain available on the Ideas website, but the rest languish unknown, unheard and inaccessible in the CBC Archives. Because the means are now available to keep these public broadcasts in circulation, I have developed this site in order to share this work with students, scholars and interested members of the public. From time to time I will post and introduce a new series until all this work is archived and available.
The podcast index lists the interviewees in every programme on the site. Links will connect you to the series that remain available from Ideas. Under Works you can find a catalogue of my books, articles and lectures, along with a complete and chronological inventory of my broadcasting work since 1980.
The Blog presents current reviews, lectures, and other occasional writings. The Transcripts page has transcriptions of most of the series I’ve posted. The CBC began making and selling transcripts of Ideas series in 1982 and gradually phased out this business after 2006, so there are some series from before and after these dates that are unavailable. There are also a few that I have only in hard copy. I will scan these and add them, as time allows.
Everything below is clickable. Enjoy your foraging and ruminating. A nurturing feast wherever you turn!
This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now
Visits: 177
Footnotes:
You may ask as well: Who is Ivan Illich? Penn State University Press has this to say:
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.[↩]
Wayne Northey was Director of Man-to-Man/Woman-to-Woman – Restorative Christian Ministries (M2/W2) in British Columbia, Canada from 1998 to 2014, when he retired. He has been active in the criminal justice arena and a keen promoter of Restorative Justice since 1974. He has published widely on peacemaking and justice themes. You will find more about that on this website: a work in progress.
View all posts by Editor
He has just published a massive 560-page volume: Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey. (And right now (February 2021), Penn State University Press is offering a 30% discount.) David by the way has interviewed and written about Illich over many years.1
