Contextualizing Marshall McLuhan

Abstract

My 5,500-word essay "Contextualizing Marshall McLuhan" reviews the life and thought of the Canadian Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), a convert to Roman Catholicism, up to about the publication of his 1964 book Understanding Media. He was a Thomist -- that is, a follower of St. Thomas Aquinas and his Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and theology. McLuhan was especially interested in Aquinas' discussion of analogy. However, at the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) in the Roman Catholic Church, Aquinas was officially downgraded a wee bit from the most favored status that his thought had previously in the twentieth century. In my essay, McLuhan emerges as a conservative Roman Catholic compared to the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003) and also compared to the Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984).