In the long run we find all the attempts to assure ourselves of control and impose order converging on a common ritually organized set of institutions that dominate our collective lives. And it is on Illich’s view the Church itself that is the archetypal Institution on the basis of which all other modern institutions have their being. Much of Illich’s life was devoted to analyzing and revealing the community-destroying and life-denying nature of the institutions of the modern world. And in the extremities of contemporary life dominated by technologies controlled, or more often let loose, by human agency, too many of us are finally victims of what Illich calls “the break with the world.” What used to be Creation is conceived instrumentally, organized and manipulated by human, or inhuman hands. The world of the person, of flesh and sacrament is gone. In one of his bleaker pronouncements, Illich refers to the great Jewish poet Paul Celan with whom he felt considerable affinity. Illich wr…
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