Broadly speaking, certain aspects of the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic spirit of contending with modernity and consumerism resembled the aspects of critiques advanced by the critical theory of the atheistic Frankfurt school of thought in Europe. But of course no self-respecting atheist would have anything favorable to say about papal critiques of modernity and secularism -- or about similar critiques advanced by Roman Catholic authors such as McLuhan and Ong. Conversely, no self-respecting Catholics such as McLuhan and Ong would have anything favorable to say about critiques advanced by the FrankfurtSchool authors.
In American culture, the prestige culture was dominated from colonial times down to about 1960 by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs). Down to about 1960 when the Harvard-educated white Roman Catholic Irish American John F. Kennedy was narrowly elected president of the United States, the American WASP elite paid no attention to papal critiques of modernity and secularism -- or to other Roman Catholic authors in general. For their part, pre-Vatican II Roman Catholics characteristically used the thought of the American WASP elite for target practice and critique -- not for finding points of common ground. We should not forget this cultural context when we consider McLuhan's extraordinary rise to fame after the publication of his books The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press, 1962) and Understanding Media: Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964).
Timeline: 1936
In 1936, McLuhan published his first significant article: "G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic" in the Dalhousie Review, volume 15, pages 455-464. Chesterton was a prolific writer of books and op-ed commentaries and a well-known public speaker debater. He was a larger than life character -- and a famous convert to Roman Catholicism. He wrote poetry, biographies, literary criticism, and religious reflections. Among his many books, you will find biographies of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis of Assisi that are still worth reading today. Because McLuhan followed Chesterton's example and converted to Roman Catholicism, we should note that in his mid-twenties McLuhan was interested in Chesterton as a practical mystic.
McLuhan's essay about Chesterton is reprinted in McLuhan's posthumously published collection of essays titled The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion, edited by Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek (Stoddart Publishing, 1999).
When McLuhan was teaching English at St. Mike's at the University of Toronto later in his life, he served as the director of Hugh Kenner's Master's thesis on Chesterton. Kenner's thesis was subsequently published as the book Paradox in Chesterton (Sheed & Ward, 1947 -- with an introduction by McLuhan (pages xi-xxii).
Timeline: 1937-1944
From 1937 to 1944, McLuhan taught English at St. LouisUniversity. During this time, he continued to work on his 1943 CambridgeUniversity doctoral dissertation. As a matter of fact, he took a leave of absence in 1939-1940 to return to CambridgeUniversity to work further on his dissertation there. His unrevised dissertation was published posthumously as The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, edited by W. Terrence Gordon (Gingko Press, 2006). McLuhan's dissertation is about the verbal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic (or logic) from roughly the time of Cicero to the time of Thomas Nashe. (Nashe and Shakespeare were contemporaries in England.)
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