Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) September 20, 2023: My favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter Jackson Ong, Jr. (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955).
Walter Jackson Ong, Jr., was a cradle Catholic, born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. However, Walter Jackson Ong, Sr., was a Protestant, who converted to Catholicism on his death bed.
Walter Jr, and his younger brother, both attended and graduated from Rockhurst High School and Rockhurst College (now Rockhurst University) - both Jesuit educational institutions in Kansas City, Missouri.
In September of 1935, after graduating from college in 1933 and then working for about two years, Walter Jr. entered the Jesuit novitiate at a farm in Florissant, Missouri - not far from St. Louis, Missouri. As part of young Walter's lengthy Jesuits formation, he was sent to studies at Saint Louis University in the City of St. Louis. There, he did graduate studies in philosophy (where the course for young Jesuit were taught in Latin - and the exams were in Latin) - and in English.
The young Canadian Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University, 1943), a recent convert to Catholicism, taught in the Department of English at Saint Louis University from 1937 to 1944. As part of young Ong's graduate studies in English, he studied under young McLuhan. They became life-long friends.
In any event, after Ong had completed his lengthy Jesuit formation, he proceeded to doctoral studies in English at Harvard University. At Harvard, the Americanist Perry Miller (1905-1963), the author of the massively researched 1939 book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Harvard University Press; for specific page references to Peter Ramus, see the "Index" [p. 528]), served as the director of Ong's ambitious doctoral dissertation on the history of logic and rhetoric from antiquity in Western cultural history up to, and beyond, the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572).
In 1958, Harvard University Press published Ong's massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason [in the Age of Reason] - his pioneering study of the print culture that emerged in Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s.
I have written about Ong's thought in his massively researched 1958 book in my somewhat lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):
More recently, I have also written about Ong's thought in my OEN article "Walter J. Ong on Historical and Other Humanistic Studies" (dated September 10, 2023):
In 1962, the University of Toronto Press published McLuhan's ambitious book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man.
Ong published a generous review of McLuhan's ambitious 1962 book in the Jesuit-sponsored magazine America, volume 107, number 24 (September 15, 1962): pp. 743 and 747; it is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Hampton Press, 2002, pp. 307-308.
In Ong's generous review of McLuhan's 1962 book, he makes one of the most extraordinary statements that he makes in his entire body of 400 or so distinct publications (not counting translations or reprintings as distinct publications):
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