Got this worthwhile comment on a previous post from Sean Landers which I want to save for later:

I’m not entirely sure how relevant this is to your idea of media-as-theology - but Marshall McLuhan was raised as a Christian, in a Baptist family later converted to Catholicism, and this profoundly imprinted on him. I read somewhere recently (WikiPedia, I think) that his work in Media Studies was essentially a smokescreen for fundamentally Catholic/theological notions about the world.

I’m a media studies graduate, actually, and I’ve also been reading the Jesuit thinker Teilhard de Chardin for awhile, now, and I thought from the first that I had detected a similarity there in the vision of humanity & the globe, and the way the vision is presented. Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere and McLuhan’s Global Village, say. .. and they have a similar relation to their chosen fields… Teilhard de Chardin:anthropology::McLuhan:media studies.

The chief difference between the pair, if I was to characterize it off the cuff, goes as follows; Teilhard de Chardin uses palentology and geology to further his vision theology; in my eyes, McLuhan uses theology to further media studies.

Interesting stuff, especially that bit about McLuhan’s work being a smokescreen for a Christian worldview. I tracked down the reference Landers made to Wikipedia, and it may have been partially triggered by this snippet of McLuhan’s where he talks about how “the medium is the message” in a book called The Medium and The Light:

“In Jesus Christ, there is no separation or distance between the medium and the message; it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.”

I’ll look around and see what else I can locate in a similar vein. Thanks for the tip Sean!