Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) December 24, 2022: I should begin this freewheeling review essay about the American Jesuit Paul A. Soukup's new 2022 book A Media Ecology of Theology: Communicating Faith throughout the Christian Tradition (Baylor University Press) with certain disclosures about my scholarly interests and background - in two parts - before I turn to his new 2022 book.
In 2022, the Media Ecology Association awarded Paul A. Soukup its Walter J. Ong Award for Career Achievement in Scholarship in Media Ecology. The Media Ecology Association (MEA) awards eighteen awards annually - all of which are listed year by year at the MEA website:
Now, over the years, Paul A. Soukup has also received the Media Ecology Association's Christine L. Nystrom Award for Career Achievement in Service to the Field of Media Ecology in 2017; the Edmund S. Carpenter Award for Career Achievement in Editing in the Field of Media Ecology in 2012 (jointly with Thomas J. Farrell for the seven Ong-related books that we co-edited); and the MEA Convention Top Paper Award in 2016 for his paper "Everyone Searching for a Savior: Film, Television, Theology, and Media Ecology" (I am here listing these MEA awards in the order in which they are listed at the MEA website - not in chronological order by the year in which the award was conferred).
Subsequently, Soukup's MEA convention paper was published as the article "Everyone's Searching for a Savior: Film, Theology, and Media Ecology" in Explorations in Media Ecology, volume 15, numbers 3 & 4 (2016): pp. 307-322.
Part I of My Disclosures.
My favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) of Saint Louis University (SLU), the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri. Over the years, I took five courses from Ong at SLU. In addition, I published a book about his life and eleven of his books and selected articles titled Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication, 2nd ed.; with an "Introduction" by Robert A. White, S.J. (pp. xvii-xxiv) (Hampton Press, 2015; 1st ed., 2000). In 2001, the Media Ecology Association awarded my book its Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Scholarship.
In addition to being honored by the Media Ecology Association by naming its Walter J. Ong Award for Career Achievement in Scholarship in Media Ecology after him, Ong received the Media Ecology Association's Walter Benjamin Award for Outstanding Article in the Field of Media Ecology in 2000 for his article "Digitization Ancient and Modern: Beginning of Writing and Today's Computers" in Communication Research Trends, volume 18, number 2 (!998): pp. 4-21. It is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Hampton Press, 2002, pp. 527-549).
For a detailed discussion of Ong's pioneering media ecology thought from the 1950s onward, see my somewhat lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):
Now, Wikipedia has an entry on the field of Media Ecology, including some information about Ong - and a photo of him. However, even though the Wikipedia entry does not happen to contain any totally inaccurate information about Ong, it is strongly skewed toward the Canadian Renaissance specialist and Media ecology theorist and Catholic convert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University Press, 1944).
Even though the Wikipedia entry also does not contain any totally inaccurate information about McLuhan, I would point out that McLuhan's pioneering book about print culture The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press, 1962) includes explicit references to Ong's pioneering book about print culture Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press, 1958a).
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