Loving The Lord With Your Whole Brain: Reflections on Theology, Church History, Neuroscience and Media Ecology

by Michael Giobbe Abstract: We are told in Matthew’s Gospel that the two greatest commandments are these: “You shall love the Lord with your whole heart, soul, mind and strength,” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Marshall McLuhan details in his Cambridge dissertation, and in The Gutenberg Galaxy, The Global Village and The […]

The Faith of McLuhan vs. The McLuhan of Faith: Understanding His Holy Ground

Written by Michael Giobbe. From the early 19th century to the present, there has been an enterprise called “The Quest for The Historical Jesus” [Allen, 1998]. It was – and continues to be – an attempt to differentiate the actual, situated “Jesus of history” from the Jesus of religious teaching and worship, the “Jesus of faith.” […]

The Bible and Media Theory

Everyone in media studies reveres Marshall McLuhan, whose coinage “the medium is the message” is a foundational axiom of the field. Most of his followers in that thoroughly secular discipline, however, probably don’t know that McLuhan was a devout Catholic. Another giant in Media Studies, French philosopher and sociologist Jacques Ellul, was a passionate Christian. Professors […]

Technologies of Narcissism: The Printing Press to Facebook

Written by Rachel Armamentos. In a 2005 commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, a story of only two sentences in length was told. Although concise and simple, this story and the speech that followed made an impact on the audience in attendance, as well as to audiences today. […]

From Wittenberg to WikiLeaks: The Parallel Paths of Martin Luther and Edward Snowden

On the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, scholars, theologians, and laymen alike yearn to understand and perceive the drama of Martin Luther’s mallet on the Wittenberg Church door. A common temptation in seeking contemporary moments analogous to the dynamics of 16th Century Germany consists of limiting the range of observed events to the pews […]

The Reformation as Media Event

A version of this paper was published in The People’s Book: The Reformation and the Bible in April 2017, which was itself a print version of a talk given in 2016 at the Wheaton Theology Conference. The book can be purchased here and an alternate version of the video can be viewed here.  If historians are to attempt to write […]

Marshall McLuhan as a Realist Philosopher

Marshall McLuhan, as a newcomer to the Catholic Church in 1937, accepted the realist philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas as its official philosophy. He contributed to the philosophy through a language-based total approach to reality which reconciled the separation between the humanities and the sciences. The root of the separation was in two versions of […]

Wayword by Mr. and Mrs. Garrett Soucy

. . .the process of perception is that of incarnation. Marshall McLuhan, The Medium and the Light ‘Wayword’ (available on CDBaby) is a second collection of songs by Mr. & Mrs. Garrett Soucy, a collection of songs with many allusions to both Christian faith and McLuhan’s ideas about media and culture.  I note the artists’ […]

The Phone Is Too Much With Us

A poem by Benjamin Chase, after William Wordsworth.

Ellul Meets Bazin: The Ethics of Reality and the Photo/Cinema Image

On the very first page of his book The Humiliation of the Word, the French theologian and cultural critic Jacques Ellul makes his first reference to cinema: “There is also cinematic language—I’m well aware! But too often people forget that this sequence of images is not the same thing as the organization of sentences” (Ellul, […]

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