Wayne Northey: Introduction

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.

And to cite the Wikipedia article:

David Cayley is a Toronto-based Canadian writer and broadcaster, who is known for documenting the philosophy of prominent thinkers of the 20th century—Ivan Illich, Northrop Frye, George Grant, and Rene Girard. His work has been broadcast on CBC Radio One’s programme Ideas.

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 beguiles a “Renaissance Man” at work. (He would likely not accept such a view–then point to any number of whom he thinks are/were such.)

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

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. (Yes, I listened to them all.) You may also read his subsequent book: Ideas on the Nature of Science.
• His final two 12-part broadcast series, planned initially as one unit, “The Myth of the Secular (2012) CBC Radio; and “After Atheism: New Perspectives on God and Religion” (2014) CBC Radio (also on his website), present some fascinating perspectives by leading thinkers. (Yes, I listened to them all too.)
• 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 awarded an honorary Doctorate of Theology. 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!