Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) January 30, 2022: In my OEN article "Graham Majin on Marshall McLuhan" (dated January 19, 2022), I discussed the young and brash conservative British journalist Graham Majin's recent lengthy article "Bitter Fruit: Marshall McLuhan and the Rise of Fake News" in the conservative online outlet Quillette (dated January 18, 2022).
Here's a link to my OEN article: Click Here
More recently, the young American journalist Nick Ripatrazone has published the poignant article "Marshall McLuhan, the Catholic thinker who predicted the internet, spent his last days praying with a Jesuit" (dated January 28, 2022) in the Jesuit-sponsored magazine America:
At Ripatrazone's website, he is announcing that Fortress Press plans to publish his 145-page book Digital Communion: Marshall McLuhan's Spiritual Vision for a Virtual Age on March 29, 2022.
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) himself has delineated his spiritual vision in the selections of his essays and published interviews published in the book The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion, edited by Eric McLuhan [Marshall and Corinne McLuhan's eldest son] and Jacek Szklarek [a Roman Catholic priest] (Toronto and New York: Stoddart Publishing, 1999).
Now, John Fraim, who holds a B.A. from the University of California - Los Angeles and a J.D. from Loyola Law School, has helpfully reviewed Marshall McLuhan's posthumously published 1999 book The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion in the new online journal New Explorations: Studies in Culture & Communication, volume 1, number 2 (Autumn 2020).
I will now highlight John Fraim's helpful review. He begins with the young Canadian Marshall McLuhan's work on his 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation about the English Renaissance writer Thomas Nashe (1567-1601). For those who might interested, McLuhan's 1943 doctoral dissertation was published posthumously, unrevised but with an editorial apparatus, as the book The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, edited by W. Terrence Gordon (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2006).
W. Terrence Gordon is the author of Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding: A Biography (New York: BasicBooks/ HarperCollins Publishers, 1997).
Now, in the history of Western education, the trivium included the verbal arts known as grammar, rhetoric, and logic (also known as dialectic).
In paragraph (5; my numbering), John Fraim says, "McLuhan located this [ongoing] struggle in the famous Trivium of Western intellectual tradition which compressed all knowledge into three streams [1] rhetoric (communication), [2] dialectic (philosophy and logic), and [3] grammar (literature)."
Now, at least from the time when the Nicene Creed was officially formulated, Roman Catholic theology has also involved the use of formal logic and dialectic and the propositional formulation of truths of the faith. See my article "Early Christian Creeds and Controversies in the Light of the Orality-Literacy Hypothesis" in the journal Oral Tradition, volume 2, number 1 (January 1987): pages 132-149.
In paragraph (7), John Fraim says, "Thomas Nashe fit into the Trivium scheme because he represented the age-old claims of grammar (allied with rhetoric) for dominance of the Trivium. Against this claim was the rival claim of dominance by dialectical reformers represented by Gabriel Harvey [1545-1630]" - and by the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and his allies.
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