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open call for articles | Religion, Faith, & Philosophy: contrasting ways of living?

Open Call for Thematic Articles for Conspiratio no.7, December 2025

The philosopher Leo Strauss argued that, in the Western tradition, philosophy and revelation make contrasting claims on the fundamental question of how to live. He insisted that the “life of free insight” proposed by philosophy is incompatible with the “life of obedient love” announced by the Bible. [1]

Today, we confront this question in an unprecedented way. The certainty that the progress of industrial technoscience would consign religion to the dust heap of history has been decisively shaken. The well-regarded sociologist of religion, Peter Berger, who was once a vocal proponent of ‘secularization theory’—the notion that the modern world is coeval with a decline of religion—announced, in 1999, that “the assumption we live in a secularized world is false. The world today
is as furiously religious as it ever was
”[2]

Today, both the learned and the layperson share his view. But the relation, if any, between religion and faith is not as well understood. In his last public talk, Ivan Illich declared, “I don’t want to be a religious man. I am the descendent of martyrs
people who somehow understood that Jesus freed us from what was then, as today, called religion.”[3] Yet, Illich understood himself “as a man of faith,”[4] which, he pointed out, “founds certainty on the word of someone whom I trust and makes this knowledge, which is based on trust, more fundamental than anything I can know by reason.”[5] In ranking faith higher than reason, Illich also ranks philosophy lower than love.[6]

To better grasp the contemporary moment, it is therefore important to clarify whether and how religion, faith, and philosophy signpost three possibly incongruent ways of living.

Is the “secularization theory” mistaken, and if so, in what ways? What does the term “post-secular” mean, and how widespread is the phenomenon it refers to? Does the ‘return of religion’ imply the ‘eclipse of philosophy’? Does the slogan ‘I believe in science,’ borne of the COVID years, intimate a commitment to a philosophical mode of life? How does a philosophical life differ from a religious life? In what ways are the demands of religion different from that of faith? What is the relationship, if any, between fidelity to a friend and the desire to know?

These are some orienting questions relevant to the next issue of Conspiratio (December 2025) whose theme is Religion, Faith, & Philosophy: contrasting ways of living?

Submit your abstract (150 words) by March 1, 2025. Send them to sajaysam @ gmail.com[link1] Complete manuscripts sent by May 30th, 2025, will be circulated for discussion by participants of the annual Thinking with Ivan Illich gathering scheduled in Lucca, Italy between June 18th and 23rd 2025. To be published in the forthcoming issue of Conspiratio, these discussed articles must be finalized by October 1, 2025.


  • Strauss, Leo. Natural Right and Philosophy, University of Chicago Press, 1953, p.74.

  • Berger, Peter, The desecularization of the world: a global overview, in (Eds) Peter Berger, et al. The Desecularization of the World: resurgent religion and world politics, 1992 W.E. Eeederman, p.2.

  • Illich, Ivan. The personal decision in a world dominated by communication. Conspiratio, no.4, Spring 2023, p.102

  • Illich, Ivan. The Rivers North of the Future, (eds). David Cayley, Anansi Press, 2005, p.61.

  • Illich, Ivan. The Rivers North of the Future, (eds). David Cayley, Anansi Press, 2005, p.57.

  • Illich, Ivan. “Philosophia
ancilla caritatis” in Philosophy, Artifact, Friendship, unpublished lecture, 1996.

From: https://thinkingafterivanillich.net/call-for-thematic-articles/


Kommentare
— Gast (07.06.2025 14:53)   
Thinking with Ivan Illich, 2025
San Cerbone Lucca, Italy
Abstracts of talks



Illich and Jung
David Cayley (June 19, 9.15–12.15 pm)
In his late writings, most notably Aion and Answer to Job, C.G. Jung called for a reformulation
of Christianity. Once, he said, it made sense to “ignore the dark side of the Apocalypse” in order to
conserve the “Christian achievement,” but now “a universal religious nightmare” had made the
question of the nature of God “burningly topical.” Christians, he went on, must stop “squander[ing]
their energies in the mere preservation of what has come down to them” and begin to explore the
possibility of “building on to their house and making it roomier.”

Ivan Illich was more tentative, more circumspect, and more concerned to preserve the
appearance of orthodoxy in his thinking than was Jung, but Illich’s identification of a “mystery of
evil” as a mainspring of Western history seems to me to point, finally, in the same direction as Jung
was tending. In this open-ended talk – a consultation as much as a definite proposal – I would like to
read Jung and Illich together to see what light the two thinkers can shed on one another."


Illich historian of philosophy: Technology and Nature from Hugh of St. Victor to biomimicry
Alessio Gerola (June 21, 9.15–12.15 pm)
The goal of this paper is to highlight the relevance of the work of Ivan Illich to reflect on the
legacies and mutual relations of concepts and metaphors employed nowadays in the field of
biomimetics and biomimicry. While bio-inspired disciplines attempt to imitate, learn from and
transpose ideas from nature to technology, Greek thought already considered the possibility
that techne is an imitation of nature. At the same time, techne could be conceived as supplementary to
nature, bringing to perfection what nature could not. Mechane, on the other hand, represented
attempts at outwitting nature through mechanical devices such as water clocks. In the Middle Ages,
Hugh of St. Victor presents a reflection on tools that connects technical making and human need
through ecology.
How do these conceptual legacies clarify the stakes in the ambitions of biomimicry to make
technology more ecologically compatible by imitating nature? By retracing this history, it becomes
possible to reveal the roots of a normative ambiguity behind different bio-inspired disciplines. The
paper will conclude with a constructive proposal to address such ambiguity by building upon Ivan
Illich’s reading of Hugh of St. Victor’s philosophy of technology, who understands the normative
task of technology as the critical pursuit of remedies that draw inspiration from nature."