This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The prophet is engaged in a battle for language in an effort to create a different epistemology out of which another community might emerge.
The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.
Theologically, however, the freedom and hope of the local tradition of the church depends upon trusting and saying aloud the conviction that the U.S. empire does not finally merit fear, trust, or eventually obedience.
Consciousness | Culture | Perception |
The prophet is called to be a child of the tradition, one who has taken it seriously in the shaping of his or her own field of perception and system of language, who is so at home in that memory that the points of contact and incongruity with the situation of the church in culture can be discerned and articulated with proper urgency.
Culture | Future | Imagination | Vision |
Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.
Culture |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
As a foundation for their own intellectual self-possession, Catholics in the United States need a MYSTIQUE of more than technology and science. They need also a Christian MYSTIQUE of such things as sports and lunch clubs . . . and indeed a MYSTIQUE of the whole social surface which is a property of life in the United States. This social surface is maintained in great part by the arts of communication in the peculiar and highly developed conditions in which these arts exist in the United States. Here what the ancient world knew as "rhetoric' or "oratory' -- the art of swaying other men, conceived as more or less the crown of all education -- long ago migrated from the faculties of languages into the university course in commerce and finance, where it is taught under labels such as "advertising,' or "copy writing,' or "merchandizing' and "marketing' and "salesmanship.' This twentieth century rhetoric, like all rhetoric, has a strong personalist torque -- it has ultimately to face the problem of dealing with the individual as an individual -- and has given rise to the American stress on personal relations and personnel problems and adjustments which has appeared as one of the great, and not entirely unsuccessful, compensatory efforts of a mechanistic civilization, grown self-conscious, to deal with its own peculiar shortcomings. American Catholics need a MYSTIQUE of this peculiar American personalism, too.
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Print culture gave birth to the romantic notions of "originality" and "creativity", which set apart an individual work from other works even more, seeing its origins and meaning as independent of outside influence, at least ideally. When in the past few decades doctrines of intertextuality arose to counteract the isolationist aesthetics of a romantic print culture, they came as a kind of shock.
Culture | Plagiarism | Resentment | Rights | Sense |
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
Interiority and harmony are characteristics of human consciousness. The consciousness of each human person is totally interiorized, known to the person from the inside and inaccessible to any other person directly from the inside. Everyone who says "I" means something different by it from what every other person means. What is "I" to me is only "you" to you. And this "I" incorporates experience into itself by "getting it all together". Knowledge is ultimately not a fractioning but a unifying phenomenon, a striving for harmony.
Walter J. Ong, fully Walter Jackson Ong
We have all heard it said that one picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, if this statement is true, why does it have to be a saying? Because a picture is worth a thousand words only under special conditions—which commonly include a context of words in which the picture is set.
Culture |
In Port William, more than anyplace else I had been, this religion that scorned the beauty and goodness of this world was a puzzle to me. To begin with, I don’t think anybody believed it. I still don’t think so. Those world-condemning sermons were preached to people who, on Sunday mornings, would be wearing their prettiest clothes. Even the old widows in their dark dresses would be pleasing to look at. By dressing up on the one day when most of them had leisure to do it, they had signified their wish to present themselves to one another and to Heaven looking their best. The people who heard those sermons loved good crops, good gardens, good livestock and work animals and dogs; they loved flowers and the shade of trees, and laughter and music; some of them could make you a fair speech on the pleasures of a good drink of water or a patch of wild raspberries. While the wickedness of the flesh was preached from the pulpit, the young husbands and wives and the courting couples sat thigh to thigh, full of yearning and joy, and the old people thought of the beauty of the children. And when church was over they would go home to Heavenly dinners of fried chicken, it might be, and creamed new potatoes and hot biscuits and butter and cherry pie and sweet milk and buttermilk. And the preacher and his family would always be invited to eat with somebody and they would always go, and the preacher, having just foresworn on behalf of everybody the joys of the flesh, would eat with unconsecrated relish.
Ability | Imagination | Inevitable | Necessity | Order | Understanding |
A man's life is always dealing with permanence, that is the most dangerous kind of irresponsibility is to think of your doings as temporary.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.
The world had become pretty generally Ceceliafied.
Care | Cultivation | Culture | Ideas | Meaning | Means | Sense | Understanding | Words | Worship |
We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibilities that have been turned over to governments, corporations, and specialists, and put those fragments back together again in our own minds and in our families and household and neighborhoods.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
Care | Culture | Future | Good | Justice | Need | Plan | Teach | Will | World |
W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
Chance | Civilization | Culture | Devotion | Humanity | Ignorance | Men | Will | World |