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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) July 4, 2024: My favorite scholar is my former teacher at Saint Louis University, 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).

Father Ong's father was a Protestant until his death-bed conversion to Catholicism. But Father Ong's mother was a Catholic, and so Walter Jr. and his younger brother were raised as Catholics and attended Catholic schools. So we can think of Father Ong's father and mother as constituting a hybrid family of sorts.

In any event, Father Ong's family name is English. His paternal ancestors left East Anglia on the same ship that brought Roger Williams to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631 - a few years before the founding of Harvard College in 1636.

Around the time of the 300th anniversary in 1936 of the founding of Harvard College, scholars began to take note of the work of the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572) - whose logic dominated the curriculum of the recently founded Harvard College - and of Cambridge University in East Anglia, even when the English Renaissance poet and pamphleteer John Milton (1608-1674) was a student there.

Who was this forgotten figure Peter Ramus, and what was the novelty of his work in logic? Harvard's Perry Miller explored these and other questions to the best of his ability in his massively researched 1939 book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Harvard University Press; for specific page references to Ramus, see the "Index" [p. 528]). However, in the end, Miller called to someone to undertake a more thorough account of Ramus and his work.

In the meantime, young Walter Jr. had entered the Jesuit novitiate in September 1935. Subsequently, as part of his lengthy Jesuit formation, he was sent to Saint Louis University, where he studied philosophy and English. At that time, the young Canadian convert to Catholicism, Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), was teaching English at Saint Louis University (from 1937 to 1944), as he worked on his 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation on the English Renaissance writer Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) and the verbal arts in our Western cultural history.

Young McLuhan called young Walter Jr.'s attention to Perry Miller's 1939 book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century.

McLuhan's 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation was published posthumously, unrevised but with an editorial apparatus, as the book The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, edited by W. Terrence Gordon (Gingko Press, 2006).

Now, after Walter Jr. had been ordained a Jesuit priest and had completed his lengthy Jesuit formation, he proceeded to Harvard University to undertake his doctoral studies in English. Perry Miller (1905-1963) served as the director of Ong's massively researched doctoral dissertation on Peter Ramus.

In 1958, Harvard University Press published Ong's massively researched dissertation in two volumes: (1) Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason [in Ramus and in the Age of Reason]; and (2) Ramus and Talon Inventory, a briefly annotated listing of the 750 or so volumes by Ramus and his supporters and his critics that Ong had tracked down in more than 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe. Ong received financial assistance from two Guggenheim Fellowships.

For three years (November 1950 to November 1953), Ong was based in a Jesuit residence in Paris.

Ong's 1958 book Ramus and Talon Inventory carries the dedication "For/ Herbert Marshall McLuhan/ who started all this" - meaning that McLuhan had started Ong's interest in Ramus and the verbal arts.

Now, Ong's massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue was both his pioneering study of the print culture that emerged in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s, and his pioneering contribution to media ecology theory (see the "Index" entry for aural-to-visual shift [p. 396]).

I have written about Ong's philosophical thought in his account in his massively researched 1958 book of the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing in our Western cultural history in my somewhat lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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