Plagiarism Accusations, Retractions

I didn’t mention it directly in the “Writing for others” post below, but I linked to a Patheos.com post on plagiarism and personality-based leadership. In that post, Miles Mullin linked out to this week’s context: Janet Mefferd accusing Pastor Mark Driscoll of plagiarism in his most recent book and later, other publications. He links out to evidence of this charge, which allows you to judge some of the material for yourself.

Now, Mefferd has retracted her accusation and removed her blog with the evidence and the interview in which she made the accusation entirely. You can read her apology here.

Update: In her apology, Mefferd did not “evangelical industrial complex,” but her producer, who just resigned over all of this, did. Ex-producer Ingrid Schlueter wrote, among other things: “I hosted a radio show for 23 years and know from experience how Big Publishing protects its celebrities. Anything but fawning adulation for those who come on your show (a gift of free air time for the author/publisher by the way) is not taken well. Like Dr. Carl Trueman so aptly asked yesterday in his column at Reformation 21 [sic], does honest journalism have any role to play in evangelicalism now? (It was rhetorical.) My own take on that question is, no, it does not.”

All of this is ugly, but since it’s public, I’d like a clearer explanation than what has been given at this point. Some commenters are saying the silence of certain writers and leaders is telling, but I don’t think it’s telling what they think it’s telling. I suggest it’s telling that these leaders don’t want to assume guilt and start shooting.

Poirot Est Fini

The final episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot has aired, though I doubt I’ll see it for many months, if not years. Netflix only has shows as recent as 1995 so far. LARB has a lengthy review of the series with many quotes from David Suchet, who has worked very hard to present the truest performances of Christie’s Poirot ever. Molly McArdle writes:

As a character, Poirot has had a curious shelf life. He certainly doesn’t have the name, or visual recognition that Holmes enjoys. He also lacks that detective’s cold elegance, the kind that drives even very reasonable people into gif-making hysterics. Still, Poirot’s appeal endures. Between 2004 and 2005, for instance, the anime series Agatha Christie’s Great Detectives Poirot and Marple had a 39-episode run in Japan. In its 25 years, Agatha Christie’s Poirot has been broadcast in 100 countries and dubbed into 80 languages.

A little trivia: Suchet played Inspector Japp in the CBS production of Thirteen at Dinner with Peter Ustinov as Poirot. Suchet says it was his worst performance ever, but it helped get him the part in the A&E series.


Poirot with Hastings by ~CeskaSoda on deviantART

"Writing for others is a privilege."

Kevin DeYoung talks about a pastor’s responsibilities and possible conflicts with writing books and articles. Among other good thoughts, he says, “I’m glad I read Martyn Lloyd-Jones before I ever wrote a book because I can hear the Doctor in the back of my head saying, ‘The pastor is first of all a preacher and not a writer.’ There is nothing wrong with being a writer first, but that’s simply not the calling of a pastor.”

He notes what a wonderful privilege it is for people to read anything you’ve written, which is a good reason for a writer to get over himself.

On a related note, Miles Mullin writes about contemporary tribalism among evangelicals. “This is the troubling reality of the personality-based leadership that encompasses much of American evangelicalism. Often, charisma and dynamic communication skills trump character and integrity as popular appeal wins the day,” he observes. Like fans of sports teams who argue over purely subjective judgements, fans of preachers and writers defend their leaders against any accusation, sometimes even against obvious sins.

'Three War Stories' by David Mamet


I do not understand that discipline called “Ethnography,” which seems to me the validation of a prejudice by means of an excursion.

One can no more understand the operation of other cultures from observation than can one so understand the sexual act.

Observation, in the case of each, is missing the point, and Ethnography, or “Anthropology,” rests on a false assumption: that one may be free of prejudice.

Hugh Hewitt interviewed David Mamet, the legendary playwright who has recently “come out” as a conservative, a couple weeks ago. They were discussing this book, Three War Stories. They concentrated on the first story of this collection, The Redwing, which Mamet described as a novella dually inspired by George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books and Patrick O’Brien’s seafaring novels. So naturally I had to buy it.

This is one of those profound, densely packed works that probably ought to be read multiple times, and I’ve only read it once. But I enjoyed it, particularly the iconoclastic elements, which are many. I’m just not sure I entirely grasp the themes.

The Redwing is a very complex story, ostensibly narrated by a former sailor, galley slave, and spy who later became the author of popular novels based on his own adventures. He does not tell his story directly, but as a series of commentaries on his books, with which he assumes the reader is already familiar. So we have to piece his real story together, in non-chronological fashion. Thus we’re dealing with a story on numerous levels – “factual” (though fictional) notes on a fictional work, based on supposedly factual events. This allows the author to play with the problems of the veteran who has a need to tell his story, but not all of it. He protects his country, first by risking his life, and then by concealing part of the truth from it.

Notes on Plains Warfare is an examination (which I thought extremely apt) of the dynamics of a war in which one side had a strong moral case, superior tactics, and greater resolve, but was crushed by an opponent simply more numerous, technologically superior, and more pragmatic. It is presented in the form of another memoir, by an American army survivor.

The last story, The Handle and the Hold, is a more matter-of-fact story, a little more linear than the other two, about two Jewish friends, a cop and a gangster, who join together to do a secret mission for Israel shortly after the end of World War II.

Definitely worth reading, but more work than the fiction I usually review. Cautions for language and mature subject matter.

'The Hunger Games' Is Flawed and Other Stories

  1. N.D. Wilson, an author more of us should be reading, explains the fundamental flaws in The Hunger Games. Self-sacrifice? Not hardly. “Revolutions,” he says, “are not started by teen girls suicide-pacting with cute baker boys. Oppressive regimes are not threatened by people who do what they are told.”
  2. George Eliot writes, “And when we stood at length and parted amid that columnar circuit of the forest trees, beneath the last twilight of starless skies, I seemed to be gazing … on a sanctuary with no Presence to hallow it, and heaven left lonely of a God.” She is being quoted in this brief post on art without God and what that means for morality.
  3. A father of boys and girls talks about their roles in the world as informed by Star Wars and other movies. There are many problems with his brief presention, which I’m sure a worldview class could pick apart for a month, but I think he asks some good questions and makes a fair point. What is a girl to take away from watching Star Wars? Hope the boys fight well so she can reward them in the end? What should a boy take away from that movie? That he must fight to win and get the girl in the end? (And to touch on one problem with this presentation, may I ask why I should assume patriarchy is wrong? Is it that men are mostly wrong?)

Brooks-Prosperity

'Mad River' by John Sandford

“He sort of looked mean, but in a hygienic, Minnesota way.”

Just recently I reviewed John Sandford’s more recent Virgil Flowers novel, Storm Front, and noted that that book’s light tone, and the fact that nobody got killed in it, typified the less serious quality of the Flowers books, as compared to Sandford’s hugely successful Prey novels.

After reading

Thanksgiving 2013



“Home to Thanksgiving” by Currier & Ives, 1867

“He who sits by the fire, thankless for the fire, is just as if he had no fire. Nothing is possessed save in appreciation, of which thankfulness is the indispensable ingredient.” (W.J. Cameron)

I’ve used that quotation for Thanksgiving before, but it was a long time ago. On the old web site, I think. Anyway, I like it.

It occurred to me today how closely thankfulness is connected to faith. One of the most common hindrances to faith—at least in my experience—is worry about the future. “Things are all right just now,” I say to myself, “but what about tomorrow? Being thankful feels too much like complacency. I have to keep my eye out for what’s coming down the road.”

This is one reason, I suppose, why Jesus tells us to cast no thought upon the morrow. Worry kills thankfulness, and lack of thankfulness destroys our spiritual perspective.

So have a blessed Thanksgiving. I hope you spend it with people you love. Or, alternatively, that you love the people you’re spending it with.

Get Rich By Reading Fiction

And eating sweet rolls, Ho-Hos, and Ding-Dongs. Just watch your fingers on those pages.

Jeremy Olshan gives us advice on making money found in great novels. “Don’t expect, however, to find explicit tips on spending, saving and investing baked into the texts like messages in fortune cookies. Novelists and dramatists seem suspicious if not disdainful of those who dole out advice about money — which is perhaps why, when they do offer worthwhile personal-finance counsel, the words tend to be put into the mouths of imbeciles.”

Here are his gleanings:

  1. Read Defoe to understand money. In Robinson Crusoe, the narrator finds a drawer full of gold while searching his ship’s wreckage. “I smiled to myself at the sight of this money: ‘O drug!’ said I, aloud, ‘what art thou good for? Thou art not worth to me, no, not the taking off the ground; one of those knives is worth all this heap; I have no manner of use for thee; e’en remain where thou art, and go to the bottom as a creature whose life is not worth saving.’ However, upon second thoughts, I took it away.”
  2. Read Trollope and Dickens to spot the next Bernie Madoff. “Rereading these Victorian novels,” Olshan writes, “I’ve been struck, in a way that never occurred to me in high school or college, by how often the plots turn on bad financial decisions.”
  3. Read Eliot and Flaubert before swiping that credit card. “Emma Bovary isn’t brought down by cheating on her doctor husband but by racking up ruinous amounts of debt.”
  4. Read Dickens to learn the difference between saving and hoarding.
  5. Read Tolstoy before heading to the car dealership. “The old poker player’s adage that if, after a few minutes at the table, you can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you, is more or less true in every financial transaction.”

Book Reviews, Creative Culture