Walter J. Ong, S.J.

Via George, I learned this morning that Walter J. Ong, S.J. has died. When I first read Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word in graduate school it was one of those books where the answers were kept: that is, it articulated a set of ideas I had instinctively believed were important, but which I had thus far lacked the vocabulary or thought structures to express. It would be an exaggeration, but not much of one, to say that all of my current interests—textual studies, design, new media—stem from this one volume. I’ve since taught the book to both undergraduate and graduate students and it never fails to elicit that most valuable of classroom responses: “I never thought about that before.”

Update: I neglected to mention that Ong was a student of Marshall McLuhan when he did his master’s in English at St. Louis University.