The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion

by Marshall McLuhan, Jacek Szlarek, Eric McLuhan (Editor)

Book by McLuhan, Marshall

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Christianity, Technology, Theology

224 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1999

About the author

Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is known as the "father of media studies".
McLuhan coined the expression "the medium is the message" in the first chapter in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man and the term global village. He predicted the World Wide Web almost 30 years before it was invented. He was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, though his influence began to wane in the early 1970s. In the years following his death, he continued to be a controversial figure in academic circles. However, with the arrival of the Internet and the World Wide Web, interest was renewed in his work and perspectives.

Reviews

[Julie Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why haven't I been hearing about this from all the brainiac blogging Catholics out there?

A thousand thanks to Mike Lawler for thrusting his copy of this book into my unsuspecting hands and insisting I read at least one essay in it.

Can't recall which essay because the introduction blew my mind so much that I now have to read the entire book.

UPDATE
Part of me is simply astounded at how prescient McLuhan was about the burgeoning electronic age. Here we are 40 years after most of the materials quoted in this book and what he's saying could not ring truer.

And even more of me is astounded by how clearly and directly McLuhan would talk about the Catholic Church being "not an intellectual institution. It's a superhuman institution." Or saying that our only hope is apocalypse and that the Church has at least as much survival potential as any other institution because it is aided at all times "by supernatural means. Apocalypse is not gloom. It's salvation. No Christian could ever be an optimist or a pessimist: that's a purely secular state of mind. I have no interest whatever in secular institutions as a place to have a nice or a bad time. I don't understand that kind of mentality. It guess it has taken me quite a long time to get to this state: it didn't happen overnight."

I myself am not actually in that state of mind but I've been Catholic just long enough to begin to have an idea of what he's talking about. And to want to get to that state myself.

FINAL
Sheer brilliance.

Mind you, I'm not saying that I grasped all of it or that I fully understood the things I DID grasp. So it is good as a reality check also. I ain't as smart as I thought I was.

Definitely a book that can be read and reread with great profit.

[Andrew Fuyarchuk]

I thought that this was an excellent forray into thoughts of McLuhan of which most of us were unaware. I had no idea of the extent to which his Catholicism (or version of it) was influencing his interpretation of technology, especially the "acoustic" or electronic age. He was one of those rare intellectuals who understood that intelligence has little to do with conformity except as a stage in one's moral (specifically social) development. Since it is a collection of letters, it is not the best written work, but is still an interesting overview of his thought with these unexpected religious dimensions as well.

[Patrick Hanlon · Rating 5 out of 5]

At this point, an interesting and jarring bit of time travel to dive into McLuhan’s thoughts on communications and religion, specifically the Catholic Church. One has to live with the fact that McLuhan will regularly add a spin or a curve to a thought that makes it more challenging and problematic to digest, but there is a poetic revelation to it at times. It may be hard to discern how religious all of the writings are throughout the book, but there is definitely a level of insight that has kept the text fresh in places, though the question of what McLuhan would make of all of this in the 21st century.

[IYKYK]

Recommended by @normonics on Twitter.

[Savannah Flack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did not enjoy the way this was written. I found the letter style to be distracting and not cohesive.

[Dave McNeely · Rating 4 out of 5]

The more I read of McLuhan, the more I'm amazed. This collection of diverse writings that touched on religion offers many fascinating tidbits and insights, and some works that are more tangential - if only McLuhan had developed his own full-length treatment of the subject! (If you're looking for a contemporary who tries this task in McLuhan's wake, try Shane Hipps.)