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Life Arts    H4'ed 5/31/24

Walter J. Ong, Charles Taylor, and the Age of Romanticism (REVIEW ESSAY)

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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) May 31, 2024: The prolific, and much honored, Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor (born in 1931, Ph.D., Oxford University, 1961) has a new 2024 600-page book out, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. It is a major work.

It is about poetry and the poetic sensibility in the Age of Romanticism in our Western cultural history. But it is a major work in Western philosophy from the time of Plato and Aristotle down to the present.

In the "Acknowledgments" (p. 601), Professor Emeritus Taylor thanks his "wife, Aube Billard. I have been working on this book, with some interruptions, during the three decades that we have been together. Her affinity for this project, and her belief in it, have kept me on this path in spite of everything. This book is dedicated to her."

Now, once the book-reading public understands what the much-honored Professor Emeritus Taylor means by Cosmic Connections, which I explain below, I suspect that his new 2024 600-page book Cosmic Connections will become his most widely read book.

Book-reading theists in the three monotheistic religious traditions should especially rejoice in his new 2024 600-page book.

Both theists and non-theists who read Pope Francis' widely read 2015 eco-encyclical Laudato Si' should now read Professor Emeritus Taylor's major new work.

In Professor Emeritus Taylor's Chapter 15: "History of Ethical Growth" in Part VI: "Relation to History and the Present" in his new 2024 book Cosmic Connections (pp. 553-587), he discusses Pope Francis' thought in his encyclicals Laudato Si' (2015) and Fratelli Tutti (2020 (Taylor, 2024, pp. 580-581, 584, and 586).

Also in Chapter 15, Professor Emeritus Taylor mentions Trump in two places (pp. 575 and 577). (Yes, it was wonderful news yesterday that the jury of 12 New Yorkers found Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts against him!)

No, I do not expect Professor Emeritus Taylor's new 2024 book Cosmic Connections to become a New York Times bestseller. Nor do I expect Professor Emeritus Taylor to be named Time's Person of the Year in 2024, as the singer and songwriter Taylor Swift was named in 2023 - I don't even expect to see the Canadian Catholic philosopher pictured on the cover of Time as a result of his new 2024 book.

After all, not even the twentieth-century Canadian Catholic convert and Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University, 1943) - arguably the most widely known academic in the twentieth century - made the cover of Time, not even at the height of his notoriety in the 1960s and 1970s.

Digression: I would not want to be subjected to the kind of criticism McLuhan was subjected to - especially from certain academics. However, I admit that McLuhan did play along with the notoriety he was receiving. For example, he did agree to make a cameo appearance as himself in Woody Allen's movie Annie Hall (1977), starring Diane Keaton in the title role. Evidently, McLuhan saw himself as playing the role of prophet of the Age of Television. End of digression.

As an aside, in case you have been wondering just how big Taylor Swift is, the New York Times has helped you out by devoting a long piece to just this question -- with a text by Joe Coscarelli and graphics and additional reporting by Courtney Cox and Fred Bierman (dated May 17, 2024):

Click Here

Now, in the present review essay, I am casting both Father Ong and Professor Emeritus Taylor in the role of prophets of the Age of Romanticism - just as journalists once cast Marshall McLuhan in the role of prophet of the Age of Television. From my standpoint, the Age of Television can now be seen as a manifestation of the more comprehensive Age of Romanticism - just as the Age of Secondary Orality and the Age of the Internet and the still emerging Age of Globalization can also now be seen as manifestations of the Age of Romanticism. Throughout the present essay, I will explain my use of the expression about the Age of Romanticism.

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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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