In 1996, Pastor Douglas Wilson of Christ Church, Moscow, edited and co-wrote the booklet Southern Slavery As It Was, with Steve Wilkins. If you plan to send your child to New Saint Andrews College, then it behooves you to read this enlightening monograph.
In January 2004, Mr. Wilson discovered that the book he edited contained multiple instances of plagiarized text, which the authors took from Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. In 2013, Mr. Wilson reflected back on this discovery and described his response to it:
At the same time, I really appreciated how the gentleman who caught our citation howler dealt with it. He contacted me first, but I mistakenly thought he was simply arguing a historical point with us, and so I referred him to Steve, since it was about his section of the book. But when that gentleman got back to me, more insistent this time, and it dawned on me what the actual problem was, my reaction was immediate and in the aaaaa!!! category. We pulled all the stock out of inventory that same day and put the book out of print instanter. When it came to solving citation problems, and doing the right thing about it, there never was a publisher more eager to do the right thing immediately than we were. (Mark Driscoll and the Problems of Citation)
Mr. Wilson’s witness is true. Canon Press instantly pulled Southern Slavery As It Was from its inventory and from the market. You could only purchase used copies from secondary distributors on Amazon, which brings us to Canon Press’s response to the plagiarism in A Justice Primer. They did not pull “all the stock out of inventory that same day” and they did not “put the book out of print instanter.” Amazon.com still lists 26 copies of A Justice Primer for sale, which Canon Press could
- Purchase for a total cost of $374.40; or
- Ask Amazon to return.
Question: Why has Canon Press refused to act with the same sense of urgency this time that they showed the last time they had a plagiarism eruption?
HT: Frank
Doug Wilson thinks not getting caught in a sin is the same thing as obeying.
And when he does get caught — and only when he’s caught — he wriggles like a snake and renames things. It wasn’t plagiarism. It was a “citation howler.” Canon Press has “pulled the book,” but it’s still for sale. And Doug is never vindictive, he just “punches back twice as hard” like the apostle Paul taught us.
If any readers of this website have read Natalie Greenfield’s blog, you’ll recall she said that her family used to joke about how Jamin Wight could talk his way out of anything. They referred to it as “Wight washing.”
I wonder who he learned it from?