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The Challenges of Ivan Illich The Challenges of Ivan Illich: A Collective Reflection edited by Lee Hoinacki and Carl Mitcham State Univ. of New York Press, 2002 240 pp. $24.95, paper

The passing of philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich in December of 2002 made little more than a blip on the radar screen of the American culture of critical discourse. Works such as Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, Energy and Equity, and Medical Nemesis established Illich as a leading voice in the radical rethinking of modern social institutions we have come to associate with the 1960s. But by the late 1970s, Illich began to see his countercultural star fall in the face of an emerging intellectual consensus all too willing to judge thinkers by conventional political categories of liberal and conservative. In an obituary oozing with a smug self-referentiality uniquely its own, The New York Times declared Illich's thought obsolete by citing the changing assessment of a Times columnist who had praised Illich in 1971, but by 1989 had declared that he had thrown out all his personal copies of Illich's books. Only slightly less condescending, Peter Berger's personal reflections in First Things tempered a similar intellectual dismissal by acknowledging a certain respect for Illich's personal integrity and an appreciation for his lifelong commitment to Roman Catholicism.

Illich's Christian faith may come as a bit of a surprise to those who knew him exclusively as a savage critic of modern education or through his environmental writing in the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog. It nonetheless provides a revealing leitmotif running through the essays that make up The Challenges of Ivan Illich: A Collective Reflection, edited by Lee Hoinacki and Carl Mitcham and published shortly before Illich's death. A kind of anticipatory eulogy, this collection of the essays by friends, colleagues, students, and admirers reflects in range, if not quality, the scope of Illich's intellectual career, suggesting that his road less traveled may yet provide some guidance for those who refuse give up on the search for viable alternatives to capitalist modernity. That Illich consistently referred to this road as a Via Crucis should provide inspiration to Christians looking for models of social and political engagement rooted in a distinctly Christian theological framework.

Even at the height of Illich's popularity in the mid-1970s, his Christian faith was something like a best-kept secret. One of the few book-length studies of Illich published during this period, John L. Elias' Conscientization and Deschooling, claimed Illich for a tradition of Catholic humanism but acknowledged that most readers would be surprised by such a claim. A quarter century later, Illich's religious orientation still gives cause for surprise. In the opening essay of The Challenges of Ivan Illich, Lee Hoinacki writes that people understand Illich variously as a social critic, a historian, or a philosopher, but only rarely as a theologian.

Were Illich's faith a purely private or intellectual matter, this might be understandable. However, Illich began his public career in the 1950s as a Roman Catholic priest working with Puerto Rican immigrants at Incarnation Parish in the Washington Heights section of New York City. Against the assimilationist ethos of the early civil rights movement and anticipating the Second Vatican Council's endorsement of "inculturation," Illich argued that the Church could best serve the newly arrived Puerto Ricans by helping them to sustain their traditional liturgical and devotional practices in their new environment. Unlike the progressive, "social justice" Catholicism of the late 1960s, Illich saw culture, rather than economic inequality, as the starting point in the pastoral care of the poor. Hoinacki notes Illich's academic training in the history of liturgy, and argues that Illich "understood … that the most ominous expression of secularization in the West was … the decline of liturgy, the routinization and emptying out of religious ritual in the churches." The liturgical lens through which Illich read modernity may account for the difficulty so many secular intellectuals have had in understanding, much less accepting, his social critique.

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