For further reading about the Second Vatican Council, see the 880-page 2023 Oxford Handbook of Vatican II, edited by Catherine E. Clifford and Massimo Faggioli (Oxford University Press).
Now, more notably in my life, I remember taking my first class in English from the American Jesuit Walter J. Ong, mentioned above, at Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in the City of St. Louis, in the fall semester of 1964. I was impressed with him as a teacher and as the author of the 1962 book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (Macmillan), mentioned above - he had assigned some of his essays in it to us to read.
Over the years, I took five courses from Father Ong. After the 1960s, I devoted a substantial amount of time and energy to writing and talking about Ong's mature work from the early 1950s onward. For further details, see my recent OEN article "Thomas J. Farrell on Thomas J. Farrell" (dated November 17, 2023):
In the 1960s, I remember hearing the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., speak on the campus of Saint Louis University on October 12, 1964. I also remember hearing him speak again at the state capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 25, 1965. For further discussion, see my OEN article "Jonathan Eig on the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr." (dated May 28, 2023):
In addition, I remember certain acronyms that were frequently used in headlines in the 1960s: JFK, MLK, LBJ, and RFK. Yes, I am aware that headline writers had used the acronym FDR. I can understand why headline writers would prefer to use the acronym FDR rather than the longer word Roosevelt. I can also understand why headline writers would favor the acronyms JFK, LBJ, and RFK rather than their respective surnames. However, I find it harder to understand why headline writers would use the acronym MLK rather than his surname.
In any event, in the 1960s, I first heard about the French Jesuit paleontologist and religious writer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) from Ong. During Teilhard's lifetime, the Vatican had forbidden him from publishing his views about evolution. However, after his death in 1955, Teilhard's works began to be published in French - and English translations of them quickly followed. The Vatican objected to his works about evolution because evolutionary theory did not square up well with the two accounts of creation in the book of Genesis.
In the 1950s, Ong had a room in a Jesuit residence in Paris for three years (November 1950 to November 1953), where Teilhard also had a room. Ong had read Teilhard's writings in manuscript form when he was living in Paris. When Ong was living in Paris, he dispatched his review-article "The Mechanical Bride: Christen the Folklore of Industrial Man" for publication in the now-defunct Social Order (Saint Louis University), volume 2, number 2 (February 1952): pp. 79-85. As the title of Ong's review-article hints, it is about the Canadian Catholic convert Marshall McLuhan's 1951 book The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man (Vanguard). But the word "Christen" in the subtitle of Ong's 1952 review-article is Ong's editorializing, not McLuhan's.
The young Canadian Catholic convert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University, 1943) taught English at Saint Louis University from the fall semester of 1937 to the spring semester of 1944. During that time, the young Walter Ong had studied English under McLuhan at SLU.
In Ong's 1952 review-article, he calls attention to Teilhard's thought. Under the subheading "Three Sphere of Being" (p. 84), Ong says, "For some time now in France, a favorite way of conceiving the earth engages it in spheres once more [echoing the ancient harmony of the spheres that Ong had discussed earlier]. There was first the earth's surface, a 'cosmosphere,' a surface devoid of life, unified by mere continuity. Then this was slowly infiltrated by a self-perpetuating network of living organisms, with an interlaced dependence on one another, to form a more highly unified surface than before, the 'biosphere.' In a third stage, slowly, man, with human intelligence, has made his way over the surface of the earth into all its parts, and now in our own day [in the postwar 1950s] - with the whole world alerted simultaneously every day to the goings-on in Washington, Paris, London, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, and (with reservations) Moscow - human consciousness has succeeded in enveloping the entire globe in a third sphere of intelligence, the 'noosphere,' as it has been styled by Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. Begun in the noosphere before it was the complete envelop it is today, the work of Redemption continues in this same noosphere through it involving all lower creation, for the 'sphere' interpenetrate and react on one another.
"The concept of orchestration may prove to be not precisely the concept we need for use in modern industrial society [the focus of McLuhan's 1951 book], but enough has perhaps been said to show that horizons are large when, by the use of some such terms, we regard our industrial civilization, however crudely, in a cosmic and religious context. To do justice to the horizons, we shall have to know much more than we do about the conditions of the immediate world in which we live, we shall have to be better alerted to our own consciousness."
As heady as Ong's account of Teilhard's three spheres sounds, it qualifies Ong as one of the first American Catholics to call attention to Teilhard's thought. Ong never tired of touting Teilhard's work.
In any event, a revised and re-titled version of Ong's 1952 review-article was reprinted in the 1967 book McLuhan Hot & Cool: A Critical Symposium with a Rebuttal by McLuhan, edited by Gerald Emanuel Stearn (Dial Press, pp. 83-92).
In the 1960s, the Canadian Catholic convert Marshall McLuhan had published two widely read and widely translated books: (1) the scholarly but flawed 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press; for specific page references to Ong's publications, see the "Bibliographic Index" [pp. 286-287]); and (2) the more accessible Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill).
Yes, those two books by McLuhan catapulted him to extraordinary fame in the 1960s.
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