Insider Movements, Jeff Morton, Kevin Higgins, Dave Bogs and Rebecca Lewis
by Abu Daoud
As a contributing editor of
St Francis Magazine I have the privilege (and duty) to write at least one substantial article per year. All my previous
SFM
articles can be found in the menu to the right of the main blog text.
My recent article started as a mere book review of Jeff Morton's
recent book Insider Movements: Biblically Incredible or Incredibly Brilliant?
The
material in this book unfolded itself into an article-length article
(which is also a review) concerned with 'insider movements'. In his
book, Morton particularly takes on two of the main proponents of IM:
Rebecca Lewis and Kevin Higgins--hence the full title (and biblio):
Abu Daoud. 2013. "Rebecca
Lewis and Kevin Higgins against the Ropes: sounding the death nell of
the insider movements and the victory of Apostolic faith" in St Francis Magazine 9(4), August, pp 1-7.
(Yes, that is "
Abu Daoud" and not "Daoud, Abu.")
The
article also takes on Dave Bogs, who is the gatekeeper of the 'Insider
Movement' entry at Wikipedia, which is well-curated and totally
inaccurate. It is a good reminder as to why Wikipedia is not allowed to
be used in academic papers!
Here is an excerpt:
If you journey over to Wikipedia and check out the Insider Movement entry, you will enter the
personal fiefdom of one Dave Bogs. If you click on the ‘view history’ tab you
will find that anything
he does not like is deleted (by him). His justification for this is
invariably that a significant number
of people have said that the article is balanced. If you click on the
‘Talk’ tab (next to the ‘Article’ tab) you will find that a bunch of
people went to Wikipedia between March13th and 17th of 2012 and left
positive comments on the article. Is it possible that Dave or someone else was teaching a class on
IM, and that the students were told to log in to Wikipedia and endorse the article as ‘excellent,
concise’ and so on? (p. 4)
Dear Dave Bogs,
please leave a remark here and clarify the situation. I won't delete
your material like you do with the poor souls who try to fix the IM
article at Wikipedia. As Christians, dialogue is a fine way to work this
out, but your control of the Wikipedia site makes this impossible.
Anyway,
check out the entire article here, and let me know what you think. If
Kevin Higgins or Rebecca Lewis or Dave Bogs would like to leave any
comments, they are most welcome.
Find it a
Scribd or download the PDF from
St Francis Magazine.