General Audience with Pope Francis
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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) January 23, 2026: In the present wide-ranging and deeply personal 10,506-word OEN article, I set forth here my interpretations of Leah Libresco Sargeant's 2025 book The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto (University of Notre Dame Press).
Now, in 2023, the Oxford-educated British conservative Mary Harrington published the though-provoking book Feminism Against Progress (Regnery Publishing).
In Mary Harrington's Chapter 3: "Sex and Market" in Feminism Against Progress (pp. 52-71), she quotes "the [Canadian] communication theorist Marshall McLuhan" (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University, 1943) and then uses that quote as a springboard for her own lengthy commentary: "But as the [Canadian] communication theorist Marshall McLuhan put it in 1964, at the dawn of the information age, 'The medium is the message.' That is, in McLuhan's formulation '[T]he personal and/ social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by any extension of ourselves, or by any new technology' [she is here quoting from Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man: Critical Edition, edited by W. Terrence Gordon (Gingko Press, 2003, p. 19; original edition published 1964]. And the message delivered by the internet [long after McLuhan's death in 1980] of 'online marketplaces' and social media platforms that emerged in my early adulthood is as follows: everything is a marketplace, including - thanks to social media - those 'moral sentiments' Adam Smith ring-fenced as distinct from the marketplace. Inasmuch as we 'connect' with others [via social media], we do so while reserving the right to disconnect again: metaphorically speaking, to log off again or leave the platform if it's not working for us. The 'marketplace of everything' invites us to be together, at scale, but to do so without obligation: always in perfect individual freedom. And this includes - or perhaps especially concerns - sex and relationships" (pp. 67-68).
Now, I discussed Mary Harrington's thought-provoking 2023 book Feminism Against Progress in two OEN articles:
(1) "Mary Harrington on Feminism, Legalized Abortion, and the Pill" (dated December 20, 2023; viewed 1,295 times as of January 21, 2026):
(2) "C. G. Jung on Fantasy Thinking versus Directed Thinking, and Walter J. Ong's Thought" (dated August 3, 2025; viewed 565 times as of January 21, 2026):
In addition, I published the 3,500-word review essay "Mary Harrington's 2023 Book Feminism Against Progress, and Walter J. Ong's Thought" (dated December 2023; viewed 107 times as of January 21, 2026) through the University of Minnesota's digital conservancy:
https://hdl.handle.net/11299/259178
Now, like Leah Libresco Sargeant, young Marshall McLuhan, mentioned above, was a convert to Catholicism - on March 30, 1937. Just as young Leah Libresco Sargeant's conversion to Roman Catholicism was influenced by the writings of the prolific English convert G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936; conversion to Catholicism in 1922), so too young Marshall McLuhan's conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1937 was influenced by Chesterton's writings. Young Marshall McLuhan published "G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic" in the Dalhousie Review in January 1936, pp. 455-464 - when he was 24 years old. It is reprinted in The Medium and the Light: [Marshall McLuhan's] Reflections on Religion, edited by Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek (Stoddart Publishing, 1999, pp. 3-13). Marshall McLuhan's widely translated books The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (University of Toronto Press, 1962; for specific page references to McLuhan's references to Ong's publications about the French Renaissance logician Peter Ramus [1515-1572] and Ramist logic, see the "Bibliographic Index" [pp. 286-287]) and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964) propelled the Canadian English professor at the University of Toronto to unprecedented notoriety in his lifetime. Two major biographies of Marshall McLuhan have been published: (1) Philip Marchand's Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (Ticknor & Fields, 1989); and (2) W. Terrence Gordon's Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding: A Biography (BasicBooks/ HarperCollins Publisher, 1997). Also see Letters of Marshall McLuhan, edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye (Oxford University Press, 1987).
Leah Libresco Sargeant's 2025 Book The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto
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