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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book WALTER ONG'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO CULTURAL STUDIES: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE WORD AND I-THOU COMMUNICATION (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000; 2nd ed. 2009, forthcoming). The first edition won the 2001 Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology conferred by the Media Ecology Association. For further information about his education and his publications, see his UMD homepage: Click here to visit Dr. Farrell's homepage.
On September 10 and 22, 2009, he discussed Walter Ong's work on the blog radio talk show "Ethics Talk" that is hosted by Hope May in philosophy at Central Michigan University. Each hour-long show has been archived and is available for people who missed the live broadcast to listen to. Here are the website addresses for the two archived shows:
Click here to listen the Technologizing of the Word Interview
Click here to listen the Ramus, Method & The Decay of Dialogue Interview
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Friday, December 4, 2020Pope Francis' Let Us Dream (REVIEW ESSAY) If we consider Pope Francis to be a public intellectual on the world stage today, then his wonderfully accessible new book Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future (Simon & Schuster, 2020) should interest Rob Kall and others who share the pope's concern about top-down patterns of exploitation of the poor. Pope Francis urges us to use the Covid-19 worldwide pandemic as a wake-up call to undertake the path he explains.
Tuesday, December 1, 2020James Bernauer's Jesuit Kaddish (REVIEW ESSAY) The American Jesuit philosopher James William Bernauer (born in New York City in 1944; Ph.D. in philosophy, SUNY Stony Brook, 1981; now professor emeritus in philosophy at Boston College) has published the hew 2020 book Jesuit Kaddish: Jesuits, Jews, and Holocaust Remembrance -- the cover of which features a photo of the Polish-born American Rabbi Abraham Heschel and the German Jesuit biblical scholar Cardinal Augustin Bea.
Saturday, November 21, 2020Thomas Cahill on The Gifts of the Jews (REVIEW ESSAY) Thomas Cahill's book The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (Talese/ Doubleday, 1998) enables us to see clearly that not everyone in our contemporary American culture today thinks and feels in the ways that Cahill credits the ancient Israelites with teaching us to think and feel. For example, President Donald ("Tweety") Trump doesn't.
Sunday, November 15, 2020Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020): In Memoriam As a gentile, I celebrate here the life and work of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020), a gifted communicator. His publications, including his two new books in 2020, remain here on earth with us as an international treasure for all people of good will in the English-speaking world to savor.
Monday, November 9, 2020An Open Letter to the Most Honorable President-Elect Joseph R. Biden, Jr. In my 1,500-word open letter, I draw on the thought of a few authors to set forth my view for President-Elect Joe Biden, who is only the second Roman Catholic ever elected to the highest office in the country.
Saturday, November 7, 2020Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' 56 Life-Changing Ideas (REVIEW ESSAY) The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' second new 2020 book Judaism's Life-Changing Ideas: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible should be read carefully and taken to heart by President-elect Joe Biden and his transition team.
Tuesday, November 3, 2020Political Authority Comes from the Bottom Up? (REVIEW ESSAY) According to the prolific English Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (born in 1948), "Political authority, for the Torah, comes from the bottom up; it is not imposed top down (as in the doctrine of the 'divine right of kings')." Say what? He says this in his 2019 book Deuteronomy: Renewal of the Sinai Covenant (page 173), a volume in his Covenant & Conversation book series. I discuss this point and certain other points from his 2019 book.
Thursday, October 29, 2020The Call to Exorcize Plato's Ghost (REVIEW ESSAY) The 2003 revised Chapter 3: "The Dignity of Difference: Exorcizing Plato's Ghost" in Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' book The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations (Bloomsbury, pages 45-66) is admirably lucid. Moreover, his concern about resurgent tribalism is as relevant today as it was a quarter of a century ago. Furthermore, his prescription regarding the dignity of difference is still relevant today.
Thursday, October 22, 2020Who Is Looking Out for the Common Good? (REVIEW ESSAY) Do you think that President Donald ("Tweety") Trump has been looking out for the common good in the Covid-19 world-wide pandemic? I don't think he has been. Now, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (born in 1948) argues in his visionary new book Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times (Basic Books, 2020) that persons of good will can today help renew the common good in the midst of the world-wide Covid-19 pandemic.
Thursday, October 15, 2020Pope Francis' Vision for the World The Italo-Argentine Pope Francis (born in 1936; elected pope in 2013) is not a hippie. Indeed, he may not have heard the English hippie John Lennon's 1971 song "Imagine." But Pope Francis calls on us to imagine the utopian world he envisions in his new 43,000-word social encyclical.
Monday, October 12, 2020Like a Leaf Floating in a Stream In response to Pope Francis' new 43,000-word social encyclical, I briefly discuss how Neil Young's lengthy 2012 song "Walk Like a Giant" expresses the desire of many people today now to return to the pre-pandemic world -- and walk like giants on the land. But the pope has had enough of our walking like giants on the land. But Neil Young memorably expresses how the pandemic makes us feel like a leaf floating in a stream.
Sunday, October 4, 2020Pope Francis Reprises His Favorite Tunes Pope Francis has issued a lengthy new encyclical letter, prompted, in part, by Covid-19. In it, he reprises many of his favorite tunes from his well-stocked library of praise-and-blame tunes. But his new encyclical is not likely to be the hit that his 2015 eco-encyclical was.
Thursday, October 1, 2020The Paranoid Style in American Politics (REVIEW ESSAY) President Donald ("Tweety") Trump is the most prominent practitioner today of the deliberately divisive paranoid style of Us versus Them. But if Americans of goodwill today want to aoid succumbing to the paranoid style in American politics, what can they do to counter it in their own minds? Coleridge suggests how we can do this. I hasten to add that he does not offer a foolproof plan. But it's a plan worth considering.
Thursday, September 24, 2020Geoffrey B. Williams' Portrait of the Artist T. S. Eliot (REVIEW ESSAY) Geoffrey B. Williams' book The Reason in a Storm: A Study of Ambiguity in the Writings of T. S. Eliot (1991) offers a portrait of the artist based on his life and work. Williams describes the pivot in Eliot's life from the atheistic earlier poetry up to 1925, to the theistic later poetry. The pivotal event in Eliot's life was his conversion to orthodox trinitarian Christianity in 1927.
Sunday, September 20, 2020Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought (REVIEW ESSAY) I have published defenses of Walter J. Ong's philosophical thought in my book Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies (2nd ed., 2015) and in my lengthy introduction to An Ong Reader (2002, pages 1-68). In the present 7,500-word essay, I turn my attention to Timothy Mark Chouinard's succinct critique of Ong's thought in his Ph.D. dissertation titled T. S. Eliot: A Philosophy of Communication for Literature and Speech.
Thursday, September 10, 2020Can Pope Francis Re-Form the Roman Catholic Church? After seven years of the pontificate of Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope, the Italian Jesuit Antonio Spadaro examines the pope's way of governing the church in his effort to re-form the church. In a kind of play on words, Fr. Spadaro turns to the pope's Jesuit formation as the key to understanding his efforts to re-form the church.
Tuesday, September 1, 2020Attuning Ourselves to the Creative Universe (REVIEW ESSAY) Forrest G. Robinson's book Love's Story Told: A Life of Henry A. Murray (Harvard University Press) tells in detail the sad story of the secret extramarital love affair for more than forty years of Dr. Murray, M.D., Ph.D. (1893-1988) and Mrs. Christiana Morgan (1897-1967), both of the Harvard Psychological Clinic. In the 1920s, each of them was analyzed in Zurich by the Swiss psychiatrist Dr. C. G. Jung, M.D. (1875-1961).
Tuesday, August 25, 2020The Paranoid Style in American Politics Versus What Exactly? In Paul Krugman's latest column in the New York Times, he critiques President Donald Trump for engaging in the paranoid style in American politics. His critique is not unfounded. But Krugman conveniently sidesteps the fact that many African Americans live in big cities where the Democratic Party has been in power for years. If Black Lives Matter, then it should matter that Democratic Party has been in power in big cities.
Sunday, August 23, 2020Christiana Morgan on Creative Personal Transformation (REVIEW ESSAY) The tragic life of the American Jungian analyst Christiana Morgan (1897-1967) is reconstructed in candid detail by the American Jungian analyst Claire Douglas in her 1993 biography of Morgan. Despite Morgan's own incomplete personal transformation, she nevertheless describes the patient-analyst psycho-dynamic that is involved in creative personal transformation -- of the kind that anti-black bigots today need to experience.
Wednesday, August 5, 2020Take, and Read, Young Men! (REVIEW ESSAY) Young men today in search of meaning and direction in their lives are living in a proverbial waste land. But what can they do to find meaning and direction? The American poet Herman Melville (1819-1891)offers young men today sharply sketched possibilities for their lives in his long centennial poem Clarel (1876).
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