Stumbled Upon: 2012 and 2014 EWTN Interviews With Bestselling Author Dean Koontz

I’ve only read one novel by Dean Koontz, titled Lightning, a fun read I picked up years ago. But Koontz’s reputation in the publishing business is hard to miss because he sells millions of copies of his books, which inevitably wind up on the bestseller lists. While searching for something completely different, I stumbled upon these EWTN interviews, one from 2012 and another from 2014, in which Koontz talks about his life, his work, good versus evil, and the Roman Catholic influence in his books. It’s really interesting to hear how he appropriates his Catholic faith in his writing—and to note how he doesn’t.

Heads up—the 2012 video, above, is entirely devoted to Koontz, while the 2014 video, below, includes an interview with him as part of a one-hour news program, so you’ll have to fast-forward or scroll ahead to see him in the latter.

Also see Dean Koontz’s 5 Favorite Books.

‘Boy Who Claimed He Went to Heaven Recants, Publisher Pulls Book’

“The best-selling book that documents a 6-year-old’s journey to heaven and back during the two months he spent in a coma is being pulled from shelves after the boy, who is now 17, recanted his story,” according to Boy Who Claimed He Went to Heaven Recants, Publisher Pulls Book, published by Yahoo News.

“Today, the Christian publisher Tyndale House released a statement confirming it will stop selling the book,” the report also said.

While Tyndale House cannot be blamed for the boy’s lie (although it can be blamed for its credulity), the revelation that the book was false cannot help the publisher’s already damaged credibility.

Tyndale House defended former pastor Mark Driscoll’s plagiarism, as noted here.

As I said back in July:

While Tyndale House believed Driscoll had given adequate credit to those who influenced his work, reputable sources outside the publishing company disagree.

Neil Holdway, treasurer of the American Copy Editors Society and newspaper editor, disagrees.

A university professor disagrees.

In my opinion, the Chicago Manual of Style disagrees.

And the MLA Handbook disagrees.

And the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association disagrees.

The publisher sacrificed more of its credibility back in July when it went into attack mode following a report on Driscoll’s relationship with the publisher. The report was written by Warren Throckmorton in The Daily Beast.

Tyndale House’s outrageous PR sacrifices more credibility

“It is disturbing to us to see how quickly some are willing to criticize fellow Christians.” — Tyndale House

The execs at Tyndale House, the religious publisher, probably don’t realize how the company’s defense of Mark Driscoll has hurt their credibility yet again.

Long story short, Tyndale House has altered some of its previous plans for releasing books through the Mark Driscoll-affiliated Resurgence imprint, as Warren Throckmorton reported in The Daily Beast.

The headline on that Daily Beast article, however, made the relationship between Driscoll’s Resurgence imprint and Tyndale House sound like divorce: “Megachurch Star Mark Driscoll’s Publishing Downfall.”

Actually, it was probably the headline plus an omission in the last paragraph — but an omission that was immediately clarified by a direct quotation that followed.

Throckmorton began the last paragraph with, “In addition to putting Driscoll’s books on hold, Tyndale does not plan to print further titles under the Resurgence imprint” (emphasis added).

However, the next sentence directly quoted Tyndale representative Todd Starowitz, who said, “To my knowledge we do not have any additional Resurgence titles that have release dates scheduled at this time” (emphasis added).

To many readers, the headline might have suggested a lot that wasn’t true.

However, the article itself was solid, aside from the omission of a word or phrase that would have foreshadowed what Starowitz said in the next sentence: “at this time.”

As part of its statement that the relationship between Driscoll’s Resurgence imprint and Tyndale House is not over, the publishing company made a thinly veiled retaliatory remark against Throckmorton.

“It is disturbing to us to see how quickly some are willing to criticize fellow Christians,” the publisher said.

‘How quickly’? What’s that?

The Tyndale House execs probably aren’t kidding, but I wish they were.

Their statement implies that Driscoll has had a spotless record and the real-world issues mentioned by Throckmorton are just little aberrations that just popped-up on the radar screen.

In the first place, on his blog, Throckmorton has cataloged numerous problems in Mars Hill Church and with Mark Driscoll.

In the second place, another blogger has recorded numerous Driscoll contradictions and outrages, from recent memory as well as from the past.

I’ll go so far as to say, there are no new criticisms of Driscoll, only new details related to those criticisms.

Straining Editorial Standards

Tyndale House’s credibility already has been damaged following its defense of Driscoll against plagiarism allegations that surfaced last year.

While Tyndale House believed Driscoll had given adequate credit to those who influenced his work, reputable sources outside the publishing company disagree.

Neil Holdway, treasurer of the American Copy Editors Society and newspaper editor, disagrees.

A university professor disagrees.

In my opinion, the Chicago Manual of Style disagrees.

And the MLA Handbook disagrees.

And the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association disagrees.

In the PR world, of the PR world

Rather than address Driscoll’s problems and the allegations against him straight on, Tyndale House chose to do exactly what those “worldly” and “secular” strategists do — they took the emphasis off the facts related to Driscoll and placed it on the person who pointed out the facts.

But Tyndale House should get at least one thing straight. There is no “how quickly” to anyone’s criticism Driscoll.

Due to his own words and actions, Driscoll has been inviting criticism for years.

‘From Martin Luther To Mark Driscoll: A Literary Version Of The Telephone Game’

Unfortunately for Christianity and for book publishing and for aspirations of beginning an academic seminary, a recent post by Warren Throckmorton demonstrates once again the shoddy research and poor attribution ethic of Pastor Mark Driscoll. The pastor is involved with the founding of a seminary. For that to be successful and reliable in any sense, it will need a scholar of some gravitas to offset Driscoll’s involvement.

Please read “From Martin Luther To Mark Driscoll: A Literary Version Of The Telephone Game” by Throckmorton.

Maybe Mark Driscoll is a product of his time: 2013 poll on plagiarism, fair use, & copyright

As Warren Throckmorton’s examinations of Pastor Mark Driscoll’s “citation problems” continue, I’ve been researching “intentional plagiarism” and “unintentional plagiarism,” as well as what common academic and publishing style guides say about fair use, copyright, and paraphrasing.

More on those matters in upcoming posts. First, I wanted to share some relevant information from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

Back in July, NBC News reported the following based on a Pew report that had just been released:

Most writing teachers believe that digital tools — from wikis to whiteboards — make it easier to teach writing, but say they worry about plagiarism and informality in their students’ work, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

More than 2,400 Advanced Placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) middle- and high-school teachers were asked about the use of digital tools including interactive whiteboards, wikis, websites, blogs, and collaborative Web-based tools (such as Google Docs) as sources of help for writing.

“In addition to giving students low ratings on their understanding of fair use and copyright, a majority of AP and NWP teachers also say students are not performing well when it comes to ‘appropriately citing and/or referencing content’ in their work,” the study found.

“This is fairly common concern among the teachers in the study, who note how easy it is for students today to copy and paste others’ work into their own and how difficult it often is to determine the actual source of much of the content they find online.”

Those issues have become so important that 88 percent of the teachers said they spend class time talking to students about the concepts of “citation and plagiarism,” while 75 percent make sure they talk about the notions of fair use and copyright with their students. [boldface added]

Apparently, few really understand the academic, ethical, and legal implications of an inappropriate use of another person’s ideas and (or) creative work.

While the websites of some acclaimed universities (e.g., see here and here) note that students might not always be aware of when they are plagiarizing, those same sites name such unawareness “unintentional plagiarism.” In other words, it’s still plagiarism.

This would be a different take than that held by the folks at Driscoll’s publisher Tyndale House, who defensively have suggested that plagiarism requires an intentional act.

“While there are many nuanced definitions of plagiarism, most definitions agree that plagiarism is a writer’s deliberate use of someone’s words or ideas, and claiming them as their own with no intent to provide credit to the original source,” Tyndale House said in part of a statement released back in December.

“Nuanced definitions of plagiarism”? Cut the nonsense. Tyndale House might as well had told us the definition at hand depended on what our definition of “is” is.

Anti-Plagiarism Campaigner Says Mark Driscoll Did Not Adequately Cite The Work Of Peter Jones

Tyndale House‘s response to the plagiarism accusations against Pastor Mark Driscoll was ridiculous.

As Warren Throckmorton points out — “Anti-Plagiarism Campaigner Says Mark Driscoll Did Not Adequately Cite The Work Of Peter Jones“.

We’ve learned a big lesson from evangelical Christianity here in the U.S.:

Ethical standards only apply to those who are too poor to spend their ways out of problems, or too unpopular to bluff their ways out of shame — never mind the love of money being the root of all evil.

Please join me in refusing to buy anything from Tyndale House until the company changes its editorial standards.

Please copy and paste this in a tweet, Facebook post, or any other social media or blog: “I refuse to buy anything from Tyndale House until its editorial standards improve.”

Undeterred by previously unacknowledged dependence upon Dan Allender’s work, Mark Driscoll announces ‘Real Marriage’ simulcast

A day after Warren Throckmorton wrote about a sudden update to the Kindle edition of Real Marriage by Mark Driscoll and his wife Grace Driscoll — an update that essentially under-acknowledged Dan Allender’s contributions to the Driscolls’ thinking — what appears in my inbox from Resurgence?

Mark Driscoll and Resurgence push an upcoming “Real Marriage” simulcast event shortly after the Kindle edition of the book finally was updated to acknowledge Dan Allender’s ideas shaped the content.

And that arrived on the same day Throckmorton writes about inadequate acknowledgement of Justin Holcombe’s and Lindsey Holcombe’s book, Rid of My Disgrace.

Either Resurgence and Driscoll are as naive as Michael Scott of The Office or they really don’t mind saying screw you to those who have tried to hold the pastor accountable for plagiarism.

This ongoing saga, with Andy Crouch of Christianity Today flaking out on plagiarism, with the secretive updating of the Kindle edition of Real Marriage, with Driscoll announcing an academic seminary in the midst of a plagiarism controversy (palm smacking forehead repeated here), has demonstrated the ethical relativism within Protestant Reformed and evangelical circles.

Fine. Sooner or later, nonsense destroys itself. Then just enough discovered truth will allow the next round of nonsense to get off the ground for a while. I’ll try to believe history is linear, not cyclical.

But in today’s media age, you’d think Driscoll and Mars Hill Church and Resurgence would at least have some crisis-management sensibility, some public-relations sense.

They clearly do not.

“Real Marriage” or “Real Plagiarism”?