The Church is the message?

Marshall McLuhan's faith under the magnifying glass

The Walrus has written an article on Canadian philosopher and scholar Marshall McLuhan to commemorate what would be his 100th birthday this year.

The article discusses how influential his theories on media and technology continue to be and how his work was connected to his faith.

McLuhan, most famous for coining the phrases "the medium is the message" and "global village," was a devout Catholic convert.

The writer, Jeet Heer, suggests that "although (McLuhan) joined the Church as a refuge (from modernism), his faith gave him a framework for becoming more hopeful and engaged with modernity."

"His faith made him a more ambitious and far-reaching thinker," Heer writes. "Belonging to a Church that gloried in cathedrals and stained glass windows made him responsive to the visual environment, and liberated him from the textual prison inhabited by most intellectuals of his era."

For those who watched the rather cerebral first video, here is a moment of brevity and levity: