Religionline

Conservadores e progressistas

From Homer to Hip-Hop
The Jesuit scholar Walter Ong studied the evolution of human consciousness via the history of communication.
by Jeet Heer

"(...) In their evolving attitudes toward popular culture, the McLuhan circle anticipated dramatic changes within Catholicism. The middle decades of the 20th century were an exciting time to be a Catholic intellectual?Vatican II was gestating, but there was great uncertainty as to how the church should deal with the modern world. Thoughtful Catholics felt the competing tug of tradition and change.
Some Catholics wanted their church to pull up the drawbridges and prepare for a long siege against a hostile world. Others pressed the church to embrace modernity indiscriminately. Perhaps the glory of McLuhan and his circle was that they avoided the temptations of these competing positions: they went in for neither the recriminatory nostalgia of the conservatives nor the faddish novelty-seeking of the progressives. Rather, they wrote as open-minded analysts, trying to figure out exactly why the modern world was changing and what could be held on to and even recovered in a turbulent era.(...)"