Jonathan I. Israel. Enlightenment Contested. Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752. (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future. (House of Anansi Press, 2005).
Uimit să citesc la începutul cărții o biografie a lui Illich și să descopăr că a fost preot catolic.
O istorie despre instituționalizarea milei, povestită de Illich. ”Let me tell you a story I heard from the late Jean Daniélou, when he was already an old man. Daniélou was a Jesuit and a very learned scriptural and patristic scholar, who had lived in China and baptized people there. One of these converts was so happy that he had been accepted into the Church that he promised to make a pilgrimage from Peking to Rome on foot. This was just before the Second World War. And that pilgrim, when he met Daniélou again in Rome, told him the story of his journey. At first, it was quite easy, he said. In China he only had to identify himself as a pilgrim, someone whose walk was oriented to a sacred place, and he was given food, a handout, and a place to sleep. This changed a little bit when he entered the territory of Orthodox Christianity. There they told him to go to the parish house, where a place was free, or to the priest’s house. Then he got to Poland, the first Catholic country, and he found that the Polish Catholics generously gave him money to put himself up in a cheap hotel. It is the glorious Christian and Western idea that there should be institutions, preferably not just hotels but special flophouses, available for people who need a place to sleep. In this way the attempt to be open to all who are in need results in a degradation of hospitality and its replacement by caregiving institutions.”