A few days ago Pastor Doug Wilson of Christ Church, Moscow, announced that he & Nancy have left for vacation to an undisclosed location. This gives me an opportunity to note one of the most bizarre instances of plagiarism that I believe Rachel Miller discovered.

I call it bizarre because of the primary source they stole from. In the last two examples that we considered, the Omnibus editors ripped from highly credible sources. Here an editor plagiarized from Harvard University’s website; and here Dr. Ben Merkle, president of New St. Andrews College (NSA), plagiarized from Seamus Heaney’s famous translation of Beowulf. However in today’s example, the Omnibus editors plagiarized from an online travel guide called Sacred Destinations, which describes its mission as follows:

“Founded in 2005, Sacred Destinations is a richly-illustrated ecumenical guide to more than 1,200 sacred sites, holy places, pilgrimage destinations, and religious buildings in over 60 countries around the world. . . . Sacred Destinations is an online travel guide. . .” (emphasis original)

Sacred Destinations does not pretend to be a scholarly website publishing educational material. It’s a travel website dedicated to promoting religious-oriented tourism. And just like the Omnibus series, Sacred Destinations does not identify the author of its material, so the plagiarized vignette went from one unidentified writer to another. The Omnibus reader does not know who wrote the inset and now we don’t know who wrote the original content that the Omnibus writer cribbed. Further, Sacred Destinations is not an open-source platform, which means an Omnibus graduate did not upload the content, contra Doug Wilson; and you will notice that the identical word-for-word theft negates the possibility of what Mr. Wilson dismissed as “false positives”; this is not a case of “America was discovered in 1492 by Columbus.” Rather, it’s another instance of large swaths of body text cut & pasted from a browser into the text editor and sent to press, as the brightly colored backgrounds in the side-by-side comparisons demonstrate below.

This example of plagiarism is also bizarre because of the content they thieved. The pioneers of Classical Christian Education who claim they have recovered the lost tools of learning pinched extra-biblical folklore about Joseph of Arimathea, the so-called Holy Grail, and King Arthur for their $100 textbook. There’s no academic discipline. It’s fake from beginning to end. It’s like Monty Python claiming to ride horseback as they skipped across the countryside clanking hollowed-out coconut shells together. Except in this case the empty poseurs, however ridiculous they may be, are actually filling children’s heads with something.

The following two images are taken from page 431 of Omnibus Volume V: The Medieval World, edited by Gene Edward Veith, Douglas Wilson, and G. Tyler Fischer and published by Veritas Press in 2010. Please note that the plagiarist wove together material from three different websites: Sacred Sites (yellow), Wikipedia (blue), and britannia.com (green). The bottom image is the inset as it appears in Omnibus Volume V.

If Doug Wilson is an educator, then I am the Rabbit of Caerbannog.