Pope Francis' 2023 Eco-Exhortation Laudate Deum ("Praise God"), and Walter J. Ong's Thought

Abstract

In my 4,000-word review essay "Pope Francis' 2023 Eco-Exhortation Laudate Deum ('Praise God'), and Walter J. Ong's Thought," I highlight certain aspects of Pope Francis' new 2023 apostolic exhortation, with some attention also to his widely read 2015 eco-encyclical, on the one hand, and, on the other, relevant aspects of the mature thought from the early 1950s onward of the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955). Pope Francis is not familiar with Ong's relevant account of visuality in cognitive processing in our Western cultural history -- which, I suggest, is relevant to all aspects of the pope's critique of the dominant technocratic paradigm in Western culture in recent centuries. Nor is Pope Francis familiar with the hope that Ong holds out regarding our contemporary secondary oral culture (i.e., the culture associated with the communications media that accentuate sound).