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 Email address: tfarrell@d.umn.edu SHARE 
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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 Each hour-long show has been archived and is available for people who missed the live broadcast to listen to.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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Sunday, September 30, 2018His Majesty, Baby Donald! (REVIEW ESSAY) Invoking Melanie Klein as his muse, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Justin A. Frank sings of the wrath of his majesty, baby Donald in his new book Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. Dr. Frank has given us a profile of unresolved infantile wrath. Both our enemies and our allies should find Dr. Frank's profile informative as they try to figure out how to play President Trump's brashness.
Monday, September 24, 2018Some Reflections on Jesuit Higher Education The Rev. Michael C. McCarthy, S.J., an administrator at Fordham University, the Jesuit university in New York City, has published some reflections on Jesuit higher education in the Jesuit-sponsored magazine America. However, Fr. McCarthy fails to include the study of Catholic philosophy as a key component of Jesuit higher education. But without this, Jesuit higher education could degenerate into mere sophistry.
Tuesday, September 4, 2018Pope Francis May Not Be Ready for Prime Time According to the Vatican News Service, Pope Francis delivered a homily at Mass on September 3, 2018. According to the pope, the reading from the Gospel of Luke shows Christians that they should escape from the grip of the crowd threatening to harm them and pass through the crowd in silence and escape. But can the pope escape in silence from responding to Archbishop Carlo Vigano's explosive allegations?
Sunday, September 2, 2018What Should Pope Francis Do Now? Pope Francis has no clearcut good choices about how to proceed to respond to Archbishop Carlo Vigano's allegations. But Pope Francis has urged Catholics to engage in encounter and dialogue. Now, if he were to say anything publicly about Vigano's allegations, Vigano would no doubt reply online with a written rejoinder. That would be a back-and-forth exchange of views -- a kind of dialogue. But it would be risky for the pope.
Wednesday, August 29, 2018Pope Francis Still Not Responding to Accusations of McCarrick Coverup As I write, Pope Francis still has not responded to Archbishop Carlo Vigano's accusations of a cover-up by the pope and other church authorities about disgraced American Cardinal Theodore McCarrick's sexual abuse of young men (i.e., not minors). The pope does not want to dignify his accusations with a response. At time, it may be fitting not to respond to accusations. But the pope should respond about McCarrick.
Sunday, August 26, 2018What Did Pope Francis Know About Cardinal McCarrick -- And When Did He Know It? Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the Vatican's top diplomat in the U.S. between 2011 and 2016, has posted a 7,000-word open letter online in Italian, which has been translated into English at the conservative American Catholic website LifeSite News. Vigano is a traditionalist Catholic. He is deeply critical of Pope Francis about how the case of the Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, now disgraced former archbishop of Washington, D.C.
Friday, August 24, 2018James Carroll's Critique of Roman Catholicism's Ethic of Sex In "After Pennsylvania, What Pope Francis Should Say in Ireland" in the New Yorker (dated Aug. 22, 2018), James Carroll, a practicing Catholic, critiques Roman Catholicism's ethic of sex. His critique has merit. But I propose to connect his critique not only with Stephen Greenblatt's 2017 book on Adam and Eve, but also with the American Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray's 1967 critique of the classicist worldview.
Wednesday, August 22, 2018Stephen Greenblatt on Adam and Eve (REVIEW ESSAY) Stephen Greenblatt (born in 1943; Ph.D. in English, Yale University, 1969) is a distinguished Jewish professor of English at Harvard University. In his 2017 book The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, he does not explicitly discuss the culture war carried on by certain American Protestants against the teaching of evolutionary theory in American schools. But he provides ample background information for contextualizing it.
Thursday, August 16, 2018A New Low for the Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. On August 14, 2018, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro released the grand-jury report about priest-sex-abuse and the cover-ups by bishops in six Roman Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania. Thus far, Pope Francis has been silent about the report. But with the help of Stephen Greenblatt's 2017 book about Adam and Eve, I want to discuss St. Augustine's influence on the church's unfortunate teachings about sex.
Friday, July 27, 2018According to John Courtney Murray, Vatican II Embraced a Bottom-Up Conception of Society OEN readers know that Rob Kall loves top-down/bottom-up imagery. I recently read a 1966 essay by the American Jesuit theologian and public intellectual John Courtney Murray in which he uses top-down/bottom-up imagery to explain the significance of Vatican II's Declaration on Religious Freedom. When I told Rob Kall about Murray's use of this imagery, he asked how would such a bottom-up approach work? So I decided to reply.
Tuesday, July 24, 2018John Courtney Murray's "The Return of Tribalism" (1962) and Trump (REVIEW ESSAY) Trump's campaign motto was "Make America Great Again." This motto calls to mind the 1950s when anti-communism hysteria swept across America. But the American Jesuit theologian and public intellectual John Courtney Murray (1904-1967) worried in "The Return of Tribalism" (1962) that anti-communism was moving Americans toward tribalism. No doubt Trump's 2016 presidential campaign evoked tribalism. So what's wrong with tribalism?
Wednesday, July 18, 2018Michiko Kakutani's Book on Trump Is Alerting, Not Alarmist (REVIEW ESSAY) Michiko Kakutani's new book The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump (2018) is a vitally important exploration of the different cultural currents that led to the rise of Trump and the right-wing in the 2016 presidential election.
Friday, July 13, 2018Can Martha C. Nussbaum Rescue Us from Our Fears? (REVIEW ESSAY) Martha C. Nussbaum's new short book The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis (Simon & Schuster, 2018) is timely, accessible, and carefully reasoned. She calls attention to how fear can dominate us and our views of our political opponents. She calls attention to how the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is an exemplar of somebody who was governed by love in his advocacy of social justice.
Friday, July 6, 2018What Scruton Doesn't Get About American Conservatives The British political philosopher Roger Scruton's op-ed "What Trump Doesn't Get About Conservatism" in the New York Times (dated July 4, 2018) critiques Trump for supposedly failing to "get" (understand) what movement conservatism is about. However, Scruton himself doesn't "get" (understand) anti-abortion zealotry in the United States and Trump's campaign pledges to overturn Roe v. Wade by appointing conservative justices.
Wednesday, July 4, 2018Joseph Crespino on Harper Lee's Atticus Finch (REVIEW ESSAY) Happy Fourth of July! The Fourth of July strikes me as a good time to remember our dark American heritage of slavery. Joseph Crespino's new book Atticus finch: The Biography: Harper Lee, Her Father, and the Making of an American Icon (Basic Books, 2018) can serve as a springboard for reviewing much of our American history, because he expertly contextualizes Harper Lee's Atticus Finch.
Saturday, June 23, 2018David Brooks: Prophet of Cultural Gloom and Doom Op-ed columnist David Brooks never tires of writing columns at the New York Times about cultural gloom and doom. But his piece titled "The Fourth Great Awakening" (dated June 21, 2018) needs to be analyzed carefully. In the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, I want to give him credit for alerting us about certain trends in superhero movies, video games, and sport. But I want to re-frame the cultural context.
Wednesday, June 20, 2018Who Will Read Troels Engberg-Pedersen's New Book About the Gospel of John? (REVIEW ESSAY) Will secular critics of Christianity read the Danish New Testament scholar Troels Engberg-Pedersen's new book John and Philosophy: A New Reading of the Fourth Gospel (Oxford University Press, 2017)? It is a follow up to his earlier book Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit (Oxford University Press 2010). In both books Engberg-Pedersen uses ancient Stoic philosophy as a heuristic for exploring texts.
Wednesday, June 13, 2018Agnostic Stephen T. Asma's Darwinian Defense of Religion (REVIEW ESSAY) Stephen T. Asma, professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, describes himself as an agnostic. But he has undertaken a respectful Darwinian account of religion in his new book Why We Need Religion (Oxford University Press, 2018). I was able to understand his account because I could readily related certain points in Walter J. Ong's thought to Asma's thought. Asma's book is a serious study that deserves to be read.
Wednesday, June 6, 2018What Men Today Can Learn from St. Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Quest (REVIEW ESSAY) In his new book Mysticism in the Golden Age of Spain: 1500-1650 (2017), Bernard McGinn of the University of Chicago Divinity School offers a perceptive account of St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. Men today who are interested in spiritual quest can learn from his spiritual quest. In Jungian terminology, he activated the Anima archetype in his psyche and the Old-Wise-Man archetype in his psyche.
Sunday, May 20, 2018Somebodies v. Nobodies: Guess Who's Winning? To avoid customary political categories, I borrow the terminology from a short poem by Emily Dickinson. In it, she says that she is a Nobody. Like her, I am also a Nobody. But I am writing about two recent articles by authors who are Somebodies. Moreover, each author alerts us to the adverse influence of certain other Somebodies on my fellow Nobodies in America, especially on non-college whites and non-college people of color.
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