Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) May 19, 2022: My favorite scholar is the American Jesuit cultural historian and media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) in English at Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1970, Ong received a secondary appointment as the William E. Haren Professor of Humanities in Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at Saint Louis University.
I have discussed Ong's work on Western cultural history and media ecology in my lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):
Ong characterized his pioneering mature thought from the early 1950s onward as phenomenological and personalist in cast. In my opinion, his pioneering thought about our Western cultural history deserves to be more widely known. His most widely translated and most widely read book is his most accessible book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen, 1982).
I draw on it and certain other works by Ong in my 2012 article "Walter Ong and Harold Bloom Can Help Us Understand the Hebrew Bible" in the journal Explorations in Media Ecology, volume 11, numbers 3&4, pp. 255-272.
Over the years of my teaching at the University of Minnesota Duluth (1987-2009), I taught an introductory-level survey course on the Bible about twenty times.
Because of my interest in Ong's pioneering phenomenological and personalist account of our Western cultural history, I was interested in the Jewish biblical scholar James L. Kugel's 2017 landmark book The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
No, in Kugel's his descriptive account of the great shift in biblical times, as he styles it, he does not happen to advert explicitly to Ong's phenomenological and personalist account of our Western cultural history that I discuss in my 2012 article "Walter Ong and Harold Bloom Can Help Us Understand the Hebrew Bible." Nevertheless, Kugel's descriptive account of the great shift in biblical times can be interpreted as the historical shift from what Ong refers to as primary oral thought and expression transcribed visually in writing to the subsequent cultural influence of the visualist phonetic alphabetic literacy.
For a succinct discussion of primary oral thought and expression, see Ong's 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (esp. pp. 36-77), mentioned above. But also see Ong's 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press), the expanded version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University.
Because the ancient Jewish homeland was on an important trade route, it was conquered at different times over the centuries by different ancient empires. For example, it was conquered by Alexander the Great, whose conquest brought with it the ancient Greek language and culture. The ancient Hebrew scriptures were translated into ancient Greek.
Subsequently, the ancient Jewish homeland was conquered by the Roman Empire. But the ancient Greek language and culture persisted. The historical Jesus was crucified at the time of the ancient Jewish Passover festival in Jerusalem under the authority of the Roman Empire. Subsequently, all of the texts gathered together in the canonical New Testament were written in the ancient Greek language.
For a relevant discussion of ancient Greek culture, see the classicist Eric A. Havelock's 1963 landmark book Preface to Plato (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). Ong's review of Havelock's book is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Hampton Press, 2002, pp. 309-312).
Now that you know the background of my interest in Ong's pioneering mature work from the early 1950s onward, perhaps you will be able to understand why I was deeply moved when I read the American journalist Daniel Bergner's somewhat lengthy article in the New York Times titled "Doctors Gave Her Antipsychotics. She Decided to Live with Her Voices" (dated May 17, 2022):
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