Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) September 9, 2025: I taught at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) from September 1987 to the end of May 2009.
I regularly taught sections of upper-division Advanced Writing courses that UMD students were required to graduate. In addition, I regularly taught three different survey courses that students could take to satisfy liberal education distribution requirements. Consequently, in each of those three liberal arts survey courses, I usually had freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors.
Because I had been studying the work of the American Jesuit scholar Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) of Saint Louis University since the fall semester of 1964, I was extremely well versed in Ongs work by the time when I started teaching at UMD in the fall of 1987. Consequently, I was firmly convinced of the importance of writing. Therefore, in the three survey courses that I taught at UMD, writing was an important element in each course.
My years at UMD (1987-2009) were extremely productive years in my life. For example, in 2000, I published my award-winning book Walter Ongs Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (Hampton Press). With Paul A. Soukup, S.J., of Santa Clara University in California as my co-editor, I published -- and contributed "Introduction: Walter J. Ongs Work and Western Culture" (pp. 1-68) to, the 600-page anthology An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (Hampton Press, 2002).
Now, the subtitle Challenges for Further Inquiry expresses my sense of the enormous potential of Ong's thought for further development by other scholars including me.
Over the years (October 2009 to August 2025), I have published 686 OEN articles, about 200 or so of which have been book reviews in which I used Ongs wide-ranging work as the larger context for discussing each book.
In my OEN article Thomas J. Farrells Top 20 OEN Articles, and Walter J. Ongs Thought (dated April 22, 2025; viewed 686 times as of September 9, 2025), three of my OEN articles about Ongs thought made my top 20 list:
(1) Who Was Walter Ong, and Why Is His Thought Important Today (dated March 11, 2010; viewed 11,691 times as of April 22, 2025; viewed 12,045 times as of September 9, 2025):
(2) Celebrating Walter Ongs Thought (dated December 30, 2017; viewed 9,218 times as of April 22, 2025; viewed 9,442 times as of September 9, 2025):
(3) Walter J. Ongs Philosophical Thought (dated September 20, 2020; viewed 2,945 times as of April 22, 2025; viewed 3,365 times as of September 9, 2025):
In addition to occasionally writing about Ongs thought in 200 or so OEN articles over the years, I wrote A Concise Guide to Five Themes in Walter J. Ongs Thought and Related Works (dated July 31, 2017; viewed 394 times as of September 9, 2025) the I published online through the University of Minnesotas digital conservancy:
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