Talk:The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

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BetacommandBot (talk) 19:41, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Fair use rationale for Image:Misssio.jpg

message: Why is there no criticism section on that book? --41.151.34.209 (talk) 14:12, 21 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  No criticism? 

message: This article, which I just tagged for other issues, is inordinately linked with links that run together and links that are repeated unnecessarily, as well as mundane links that are extraneous to the topic of the article. I didn't tag the article with an WP:OVERLINK tag. I'm just noting this here instead. Hope this helps. 72.129.81.5 (talk) 08:54, 7 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Overlinked - September 2012 - See [[WP:OVERLINK]] 

message: I have rolled back the article to the previous wording before  messed around with it. I found his rewrite to be a blatant WP:NPOV violation; it presented many opinions as fact, where the previous wording is careful to posit everything in terms of Hitchens' opinions and writings. I also restored some valuable ref work that was done after the fact. I believe this revision is one we can work on, moving forward. I do not deny there may still be NPOV problems left here, but I think they are minor, considering the tone of the book and the debate surrounding it. Your comments and concerns are welcome here. Elizium23 (talk) 03:00, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Major revert 

message: A few days ago, I edited the section Charles Keating and raised some concerns here about errors of fact in the section Associates.
Intending to review the whole article afresh, I spent a fair time examining the veracity of the little asserted in the Summary.  I find that almost nothing there corresponds with anything in the book.  It as almost as if the editors responsible for the section (it was reduced substantially to its present state by a major edit on 19 February 2011) had never read it.  My thoughts then turned to wondering what is the point of the article at all.  There is already a substantial section on Criticisms (overdue for culling) in Mother Teresa, and an entire article Criticisms of Mother Teresa.  Thus there are currently three places in wikipedia where the bemused can access what purport to be the views of C. Hitchens as elaborated in what is a very short book indeed.
Despite my misgivings over the utility of the exercise, I report here my findings as regards the veracity of the Summary.  I note, incidentally, that an unfavourable contemporaneous review of the book was published in Library Journal, cited in the article from launch day in October 2003.  Gradually, other reviews were added (mostly laudatory), and then, on 15 October 2009, an editor mistakenly thought the Library Journal link was false and challenged the citation, whereupon it was deleted two weeks later.  What had happened, however, was that an expand button had temporarily concealed the review - which is still available via Amazon and also Barnes and Noble.
For convenience I print here the full text of the Summary, omitting footnotes and links:-Hitchens primarily condemns Mother Teresa for redirecting contributions to open a global network of convents in place of building the teaching hospital she promised donors. He also makes direct claims that Mother Teresa was no "friend to the poor," and that she opposed structural measures to end poverty, particularly those that would raise the status of women. He argues she was a tool by which the Catholic Church furthered its political and theological aims, and the cult of personality that he claims she developed was used by politicians, dictators and bankers to gain credibility and assuage guilt, citing Hillary Clinton, Charles Keating and Michèle Bennett as examples.
*(1) Nowhere in the book does CH accuse Mother Teresa of making promises of any kind to donors, still less of breaking any.  The nearest the book gets to what the Summary claims, is in this passage (p. 63):- It is safe to say, however, that if all the money had been used on one project it would have been possible, say, to give Calcutta the finest teaching hospital in the entire Third World.  
It is not even true (what appeared in a much older edit – see, e.g., at 22 August 2010 and earlier) that CH implied that donors even expected her to do that with their cash gifts.  The "broken promises" jibe is a pure figment of over-ripe imaginations.
*(2) Nowhere in the book does there appear the phrase "friend to the poor", or anything equivalent. 
*(3) As for claiming that the book asserts that Mother Teresa "opposed structural measures to end poverty, particularly those that would raise the status of women", the closest parallel in the book would seem to be this (p. 58):-Mother Teresa made it plain yet again that there is no connection at all in her mind between the conditions of poverty and misery that she 'combats' and the inability of the very poor to reach the plateau on which limitation of family size becomes a rational choice.
Certainly, CH says nothing in his book about measures (structural or otherwise) which would "raise the status of women", or anything equivalent.
*(4) CH does not claim that Mother Teresa developed a personality cult around herself. What he wrote (at the end of the Introduction, p. 15) was:-What follows here is an argument not with a deceiver but with the deceived. If Mother Teresa is the adored object of many credulous and uncritical observers, then the blame is not hers, or hers alone. In the gradual manufacture of an illusion, the conjurer is only the instrument of the audience. 
*(5) CH certainly denies that Mother Teresa was "apolitical"; in fact, he calls her a "political operative" (p. 11).  He also expresses the opinion (p. 55) that:-The fundamentalist faction within the Vatican has found her useful in two ways - first as an advertisement for the good works of the Church to non-Catholics; and second as a potent instrument of moral suasion within the ranks of the existing faithful.  
This is by no means the same as "[arguing] she was a tool by which the Catholic Church furthered its political and theological aims" (whatever they might be).  With reference to her many trips around the world, CH puts it (p. 83) no higher than "worth considering" whether they were made "in furtherance of the more flinty political stands taken by hard-liners in her own Church. The personal conduct and the questionable policy are at least congruent in each instance.".  So, what the Summary declares is one of CH's main arguments, is no more than speculation. 
*(6) Finally, does CH argue that Mother Teresa (let us ignore the cult aspect for now) "was used by politicians, dictators and bankers to gain credibility and assuage guilt"?   The first limb is at least arguable in a few cases.  He did indeed write (p. 65) that she "allowed Keating to make use of her prestige on several important occasions"; and (of John-Roger, p. 7) that she "[lent] him the lustre of her name and image".  As for Hillary Clinton (and let's add Marion Barry), what he wrote (p. 10) is that they got "some safe, free publicity" from Mother Teresa.  This is reprised in the Afterword (p. 98) where we read:- she has furnished PR-type cover for all manner of cultists and shady businessmen.  
Publicity is not the same as credibility, so we must absolve CH of the charge that he claimed Clinton sought "credibility" from keeping company with Mother Teresa.  The second limb must be rejected altogether.  There is a single general remark (p. 15) about "the rich part of the world [having] a poor conscience", but nowhere does CH come close to asserting that any individual sought to associate with Mother Teresa in order to "assuage guilt".
Comment on the Summary ends. Ridiculus mus (talk) 16:43, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Summary grossly misleading 

message: The lede is no less tainted by copious errors than the rest of the article (bar the Review section).  It currently reads, in the material part (emphasis added):- . . a book by Christopher Hitchens addressing Mother Teresa's life and work. The book presents broad criticism of Mother Teresa and her missionary activity, particularly that she acted as a political opportunist and dogmatist to the detriment of those served by her charities. The book unfolds as an argument that Mother Teresa (born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu) does not deserve beatification and elevation to sainthood . .
(1) Life : The book contains one page on her life story from her birth in 1910 to her journey from Dublin to Bengal in 1928, and says nothing about her life between 1928 and 1969.  Most of the discussion of her travels and activity dates from after the award of the 1979 Nobel Prize (when she was 69).  It cannot fairly be said to "address her life".
(2) Detriment : The book characterises her international travels as "political" and denounces Catholic moral teaching (and her adherence to it) in the context of world over-population, poverty, and hunger; it also raises a broad question about the practical impact of her service to the poor and questions her spending priorities. At a stretch it might be said that the book expresses the opinion that all rightist governments and the moral teaching of the Catholic Church (jointly and severally) actively undermine attempts by others to relieve world poverty through population control. What the book does not do is claim that her political alignment (as CH sees it) or her faith conduced "to the detriment of those served by her charities".
(3) The term "political opportunist" is often applied to someone like CH who changed intellectual allegiance from left to right (in his case) for reasons opaque to those whose cause he repudiated. His book contains no allegation that MT is a political opportunist – rather the reverse.  She is presented as an outright and consistent social and political reactionary (pp. 55, 86, 88, 93).  CH did call her "a political operative" (p. 11) and "the emissary of a very determined and very politicized papacy" (p. 14).  He can only speculate as to her motives in visiting Haiti and Albania (p. 83), but praises her sense of timing (p. 87); and he says of her "[t]o invest temporal and temporizing politics with the faint odour of sanctity . . is political in the extreme" (pp. 91f.). He even draws attention to her silence on right-wing atrocities (Contra death squads and the Duvaliers) and contrasts it with her rebuke of the left-wing Sandinistas (p. 93). Somewhere along the line this all got garbled and emerged as a claim in the lede that MT was a "political opportunist".  Mary Loudon (1996, p. 65) opined that Mother Teresa is an "opportunist", but not in a political sense.  According to her, Mother Teresa took people for a ride: "travelling happily on the wave of others' desire for association with someone universally recognised as good, and possibly even touched by the divine" (not the only place in her review where she yields to imprudent fantasy).
(4) The book's argument : It is not at all clear that the purpose of the book was to block or impede the eventual beatification of Mother Teresa.  CH correctly took it for granted the process would go ahead (" . . here is a saint in the making, whose sites and relics will one day be venerated", p. 13) and conceded that "many people who are not even Roman Catholics have already decided that [she] is a saint" (p. 14).  In any case, the issue takes up little space in a book whose argument (if there is one) has no ultimate end in view but is a bald-headed attempt to debunk a revered figure whom he charges with being (inter alia)"a political operative" (p. 11), "a demagogue, an obscurantist and a servant of earthly powers" (p. 50) whose "affectation of poverty" (p. 61) is "hypocritical" (p. 71), and who "reigns in a kingdom that is very much of this world" (p. 71). That's about the long and the short of it, and to attribute anything so vulgar as a purpose to the book is to misunderstand CH.  His life's work was épater les bourgeois. Ridiculus mus (talk) 22:36, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Problems with the lede 

message: An anonymous editor recently edited out "attack" in the lede to The Missionary Position in pursuance of "a more neutral tone".  The issue, however, is Mr. Hitchens' own characterisation of his work.
As to that, he called his earlier work "polemics" (from Greek polemos meaning "war") and situated his 1995 book in the context of a "battle" (his word) between opposing forces in which he placed himself on one side and Mother Teresa on the other.  See footnote 9 to the wiki-article for the relevant references.  In his 1992 Nation piece he called her a "dangerous, sinister person" not to mention other abusive language used with regard to her (especially, but not only, in The Missionary Position.  That seems sufficient to establish the validity of the word "attack".
But there is more.  Laura Morrow in her "Media Watch" report for Crisis Magazine (1 June, 1995) described Hitchens' 1994 TV programme "Hell's Angel" as "an attack on Mother Teresa".  Simon Leys in a letter to the New York Review of Books (19 September, 1996) described The Missionary Position as an "attack" on Mother Teresa, and Hitchens, in his reply to Leys (19 December, 1996), noticed the use of the word but did not contest it. 
In all these circumstances, and without labouring the point any further, "attack" is a reasonable and fair description of what Hitchens himself thought he was doing - therefore no neutrality issue arises.  
As for the correct term to use for what was written by Smoker (and Greer, who called Mother Teresa a "villain") I am not much exercised, but the word "criticism" is ambiguous: it can imply a reasoned, thoughtful analysis or it can mean mere censure.    
My inclination, then, is to use "censure" for pre-Hitchens, but I invited the anonymous editor to revert his (or her) edit re Hitchens who clearly considered himself as attacking Mother Teresa and was openly "hostile" to religion (his word, again, in an interview with Matt Cherry, Free Inquiry Magazine, Vol. 16, No. 4, Fall, 1996). Ridiculus mus (talk) 15:16, 10 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Did Hitchens verbally "attack" Mother Teresa? 

message: An anonymous editor has deleted the whole of the section "Content" on the grounds that it provides an opinion, as opposed to a summary, of the content.  I reproduce here the first paragraph of the deleted section and invite comment as to whether it can truly be said to show editorial bias as opposed to presenting a summary of the contents of the book (the footnotes must be read by scrolling back to the last version before the large deletion):-In the Introduction, Hitchens claimed that Mother Teresa consorted with "frauds, crooks and exploiters", insinuating that she was herself a fraud and an impostor – a charge expressly reliant on guilt by association.[22] In the Afterword he casually alluded to "her friendship with despots".[23] Although much is made of a photograph of Mother Teresa receiving an official award in January 1981 from the then wife of Jean-Claude Duvalier (at that time the President of Haiti), no substantive allegations are made about Mother Teresa arising from her visit to Haiti, and the broad claim of friendship with despots is nowhere substantiated.[24] Hitchens does not claim that Mother Teresa met President Duvalier, still less that she accepted money from him or his wife. In early 1981 Madame Duvalier enjoyed widespread approval for her concern for the poor in Haiti, visiting deprived communities and establishing health clinics. Hitchens omitted this from his book, but he had previously referred to it in an article in The Nation in 1992.[25] In a 1993 interview with Brian Lamb broadcast by C-SPAN, Hitchens, in response to a hypothetical question, said: "The fact is, I don't know if she got any money from the Duvaliers".[26] Even if she had accepted money from the Duvaliers, Lamb proposed, diverting money from despots to charity might be commendable. Hitchens did not demur.
Wiki guidelines on WP:NPOV extend to this WP:NPOVFAQ:-Especially contentious text can be removed to the talk page if necessary, but only as a last resort, and never just deleted.
It is a frequent misunderstanding of the NPOV policy, often expressed by newbies, visitors, and outside critics, that articles must not contain any form of bias, hence their efforts to remove statements they perceive as biased. The NPOV policy does forbid the inclusion of editorial bias, but does not forbid properly sourced bias. Without the inclusion and documentation of bias in the real world, many of our articles would fail to document the sum total of human knowledge, and would be rather "blah" reading, devoid of much meaningful and interesting content.
I ask the anonymous editor to point out (having regard to the cited sources) where precisely this paragraph offends through "editorial bias".  If and insofar as it does so offend, the proper response is to edit out any perceived editorial bias and not to delete the totality.  In present circumstances, this process ought to be conducted first here, and not via edits to the article. No doubt it will be a tedious process, but this process will have to be repeated for every paragraph of the deleted section.  Ridiculus mus (talk) 09:26, 13 February 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Incorrect. Read Wikipedia:Criticism. Criticism sections are frequently inappropriate. If the criticism can be integrated into the whole of the article then there is no need to relegate it to a separate section. Elizium23 (talk) 19:25, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comments on Structure, Method and Content which led to wholesale deletion 

message: I tagged this for Original Research and Synthesis given the large quantity of original research in the references section and use of multiple quotes to argue that a consensus exists on the critique of this work. 50.58.99.78 (talk) 15:19, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Original Research/Synthesis 

message: This is a biased article. It is not worth reading. It tells us nothing of what is in the book. It reads as if it were written by a disgruntled old Catholic.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bunkhabit (talk • contribs) 23:58, 2 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Biased article

message: I did far more editing than I intended when I came here thinking I'd see what was said about William Donohue's thoughts about the book. So I'll explain a bit:
*No reader needs a debate about how long or short this book is. It's short. The reader esp doesn't need to read an argument with the publisher about the number of pages. The page count is part of a book's technical specifications and never equal to the count of pages of text. It's like height and width, and about as newsworthy.
*Many authors address the same subject in different formats over time. There's nothing remarkable here. I moved Hitchens' earlier works about MT out of the summary and into the body of the article. Same for the fact that others have provided less than flattering assessments of her. Unremarkable and not right for the summary.
*I started work on the contents, here called "Structure". I only stopped because I didn't want to use a Kindle citations and will pick up when I have a hard copy in hand. I'd note that quoting the text from time to time is helpful.
*Though I removed a thousand characters, it was mostly repetitive and wordy material. I created a Notes section for commentary that is not properly speaking references or citations.
I've enjoyed working on contentious subjects in the past (Dorothy Day, A. Mitchell Palmer) and hope to be able to contribute here. I'm on William Donohue lately and hope his entry is more substantive and less POV now. And he's less of a cartoon, though I doubt he's ever expressed an opinion I'd second. I certainly have my own (strong) views on The Missionary Position, but that's what makes the challenge of NPOV an exciting intellectual enterprise. One suggestion: it's much easier to write a proper summary of a WP entry when the body of the entry is in good shape. Thanks. Bmclaughlin9 (talk) 19:25, 27 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you! You have been doing great work, content work of which I am mostly incapable. Keep it up. Elizium23 (talk) 19:30, 27 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  My edits 27 March 2014 

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