Matthew Fox's 2020 Reissued Book on Thomas Aquinas, and Walter J. Ong's Thought

Abstract

My 3,600-word essay "Matthew Fox's 2020 Reissued Book on Thomas Aquinas, and Walter J. Ong's Thought" is about the Reverend Dr. Matthew Fox's 1992 550-page book Sheer Joy: [Four] Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality, which has just been reissued by Dover Publications. I discuss it not only in connection with the thought of the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955), but also in connection with the thought of the Canadian Catholic convert and Renaissance specialist and Thomist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University, 1943), whose 1962 at times flawed book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man is still controversial. In the second part of my review essay, I quote twenty passages from Aquinas' thought that Fox has culled from 52 works by Aquinas in Latin, and I suggested certain related reading in connection with each quotation.