Criticism
As a scholar who reports on New Religious Movements without condemning those groups, Melton has received criticism from scholars and organizations, especially from the anti-cult movement, that feel that New Religious Movements are dangerous, and that scholars should actively work against them. Stephen A. Kent and Theresa Krebs published a critical article When Scholars Know Sin, in which they characterize Gordon Melton, James R. Lewis, and Anson Shupe as biased towards the groups they study. Melton was also characterized as an "apologist" in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, and by a Singaporean lawyer as a "cult apologist who has a long association of defending the practices of destructive cults" in the Straits Times, and in an article: "Apologist versus Alarmist", in Time Magazine. The term "cult apologist" was also used in Esquire Magazine in describing Melton's actions in the Aum Shinrikyo incident.
Read more about this topic: J. Gordon Melton
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)