(4) Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man [sic] (University of Toronto Press, 1962; for specific page references to Ong's publications about Ramus and Ramist logic, see the "Bibliographic Index" [pp. 286-287]).
Today scholarly studies of print culture, in various languages, are far too numerous for anyone to compile a comprehensive bibliography of them comparable in scope to Marco Mostert's 2012 book A Bibliography of Works on Medieval Communication (Brepols).
Now, even though I regularly refer to Ong's big breakthrough insight in the early 1950s, I want to say here that even though he did indeed experience a breakthrough insight in the early 1950s, it strikes me as too pedestrian just to refer to his insight as an insight. After all, the experience of insight is common enough that the Canadian philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) devoted his breakthrough philosophical treatise Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957) to delineating the common human experience of insight.
See Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 5th edition, edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, as volume 3 of the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (University of Toronto Press, 1992).
Consequently, it now strikes me as more apt for me to characterize Ong's big media ecology breakthrough insight in the early 1950s as an experience of personal revelation for Ong - on the order of the personal revelations that the Spanish mystic St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), the founder of the Jesuit order (known formally as the Society of Jesus, experienced at various times, but never quite articulated (except for noting that he had experienced them).
Now, I would draw your attention to the subtitle of Ong's 1967 seminal book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press), the expanded version of Ong's 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University.
In the Wikipedia entry "Prolegomena (disambiguation," we are told that the word "Prolegomena" in Ong's subtitle "is an ancient Greek word used to mean 'prologue' of 'introduction,' to introduce a larger work, e.g., a book":
Click Here (usually plural prolegomena) is, Future Metaphysics by Immanuel K"
So we would not expect to see the word "Prolegomena" to be preceded by the modifier "Some" as it is in Ong's subtitle. However that may be, Ong's subtitle seems to modestly indicates that he is simply setting forth in his book "Some" introductory considerations that should be taken into consideration in any and all cultural and religious histories in the future. Of course, this has not yet happened to any notable extent.
Yes, Ong's media ecology account of our Western cultural history is open to religion and religious studies. Because Ong was himself a Jesuit, it is not surprising that his thought is open to religion and religious studies as well as to literary studies. Nevertheless, I would be remiss if I did not note here that supposedly debunking religion is a characteristic of certain widely lionized authors and trends of thought in prestige English-speaking academia, such as the thought of the prolific French authors Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and Michel Foucault (1926-1984).
For information about Jacques Derrida, see the Wikipedia entry "Jacques Derrida":
For information about Michel Foucault, see the Wikipedia entry "Michel Foucault":
Now, because Jacques Derrida published three important books in French in 1967, I will speak here of his popularity in prestige English-speaking academia as extending in the United States from roughly 1970 to the present time. In the November 5, 2023, presidential election, President-elect Donald Trump won a resounding victory - and the Democratic Party suffered a humiliating defeat. Trump's MAGA movement is anti-elitist. And many Americans see the Democratic Party as dominated by elitists - and wokeness and their version of social justice.
Now, the Roman Catholic Church also advances a version of social justice. See the lay English theologian Anna Rowland's 2021 book Towards a Politics of Communion: Catholic Social Teaching in Dark Times (T&T Clark).
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