Controversy Roundup

What a crazy week! And by crazy, I mean, no one outside of a few bloggers noticed any of these happenings.

First off, Neil deGrasse Tyson got promoted to the rank of ‘ideologically driven, ignorant hack and a tool’, with some lovely remarks about philosophy (I’m unable to use hyperlinks for some reason, so I gotta go with old-fashioned links:

Neil deGrasse Tyson and the value of philosophy

The responses haven’t been harsh enough. My own feelings should be rather clear on this particular topic.

 

First Things incurred the wrath of at least a quarter-dozen Barth readers with this piece:

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/06/karl-barths-failure

While FT isn’t an academic journal, it is a pretty subpar article. The conclusion is merely asserted, not demonstrated, and that’s just bad form.

 

My personal favourite for this week: Tim Challies, Reformed blogger extraordinaire, has been doing a series on ‘false teachers’ on his blog: Pope Francis, Marcus Borg, Benny Hinn, Schliermacher and many others all earn the distinction of ‘false teacher’.  But this week, his article on Therese of Avila seemed to have some plagiarism going on:

Here’s Challies’ article:

http://www.challies.com/articles/the-false-teachers-teresa-of-avila (the initial note of his plagiarizing is the first comment)

and here’s the post by one of the commentators who called him on his liberal use of Wikipedia:

Having Standards Makes You a Troll

Challies has, as of my last view of his blog, closed down comments on that particular article. Expect to see St. Peter, Mr. Rogers, Obi-Wan-Kenobi, Barney, Cesar Milan and your highschool geography teacher on his list of false teachers.