Criticism
Walsch was accused of plagiarism for a six-paragraph entry in one of the daily postings on his blog during 2008, this one during the Christmas season, when he published an item titled "Upside down, or right side up?" on Beliefnet.com. Walsch's entry purported to tell the tale of a miraculous appearance of the words "Christ Was Love" during the rehearsal of his son's school Christmas pageant; but his article was almost identical to an article published 10 years previously by Candy Chand in the spiritual magazine Clarity and spread over the internet in places such as the Heartwarmers website, down to the name of the son mentioned in both articles, Nicholas - as both authors have a son named Nicholas. Walsch publicly apologized, saying that he must have erroneously internalized the story as his own over the years, a claim the original author said she does not believe. The article was subsequently pulled from Beliefnet.com and Walsch voluntarily withdrew from the roster of authors because of his error. Walsch explained that he found the anecdote in old computer files from years earlier, saw his son's name in the copy, and was fully convinced that the history had really happened to him and that he had just forgotten it, but "remembered" when he saw the anecdote in his file. He cited it as a classic case of false memory and said that he had been repeating the anecdote as his own in many speeches over the years, adding that he was "chagrined and astonished that my mind could play such a trick on me".
Read more about this topic: Neale Donald Walsch
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“A friend of mine spoke of books that are dedicated like this: “To my wife, by whose helpful criticism ...” and so on. He said the dedication should really read: “To my wife. If it had not been for her continual criticism and persistent nagging doubt as to my ability, this book would have appeared in Harper’s instead of The Hardware Age.””
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)