Nebulous Nonsense

If it was anyone else I'd politely refrain from mentioning names, but since Douglas Wilson has no qualms about pointing fingers I'll be direct. On the site Goodreads (where members tell other members what books they've read, review them, and discuss them), Mr. Wilson has written 1,452 reviews. A lot of them are short, many of them very short, like his review of N.T. Wright's Millennium Myth: "Really good." Some are half that length.

Those aren't the ones that bother me. While they aren't very helpful for someone who doesn't know anything about the titles they purport to review, at least they indicate Wilson's opinion of them. The ones that bother me are quite different.

For instance: concerning a book titled If You Want to Write: A Book About Art, Independence and Spirit he writes, "Good or atrocious, depending." Or this one for William Beveridge's A Short History of the Westminster Assembly: "Good. Poor."

For a man who took it upon himself to defend Christian truth and meaning against atheist bulldog Christopher Hitchens, these reviews seem like rank hypocrisy. "Good. Poor." sounds like a review for two different books. Which, given the number of reviews he's bestowed on Goodreads members, may be the case. Maybe he simply forgot to save and continue before passing judgment on the next tome in his queue. Or maybe he hasn't read any of these books at all, and simply can't help telling people what to read and what to leave on the shelf.

Except, if that last possibility is the case, wouldn't he want to be less vague?

Whatever the case may be, nebulous reviews that tell readers nothing—that in fact obscure meaning and truth—are unacceptable, especially from a self-appointed defender of the faith.

Here's one for Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ: "Green vomit." Thank you for that, Mr. Wilson. I have no love for Nietzsche, but if that's all you can come up with I think it's best you leave your comments to yourself. Of course, when you get to the point you think everything you say is gold, it's probably tough to sort the worthless from the worthwhile.

Again, none of this would bother me if Wilson was just some schmoe who had no life apart from the Internet. But he's not: he's published numerous books on mostly Christian topics, he pastors a large church in Moscow, Idaho, leads a growing denomination of Christian churches, interacts publicly with non-Christians like Hitchens and Christians like Mark Driscoll, and generally makes himself as well-known as possible. It would be nice if he could stop talking long enough to realize he doesn't have all the answers, and that a lot of what he says is just plain incomprehensible.