Steal This Sermon!
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday April 7th, 2002
***
I can’t imagine that any of you have been following this particular news item as closely as I have, but out in the suburbs of Detroit there is an Episcopal Priest who has just been suspended from his job for 90 days by his Bishop after he was accused of plagiarizing significant portions of his sermons off of the internet. This is the second case like this to come up in the past few months; last October, the Senior minister of a 1600-member Presbyterian Church in Clayton, Missouri resigned his pulpit after confessing to a similar transgression.
Of course, clergy aren’t the only ones afflicted by the temptation to copy somebody else’s work and pass it off as their own. It has also recently come to light that two of America’s most prominent, popular historians -- Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin -- have both been guilty of lifting passages verbatim from the published writings of other historians, and including them without attribution in best-selling books of their own. At least initially, Ambrose and Goodwin both attributed their oversight to sloppy note-taking -- which is to say, they each claimed that their lack of attribution was actually the result of a lack of oversight over their research assistants, who had inadvertently neglected to indicate that the passages in question were, in fact, direct quotations rather than paraphrased summaries. Both have apologized, without really admitting to any serious wrong-doing, and both I’m sure will continue to enjoy long and successful careers as TV pundits and celebrity commentators.
The situation involving the two clergymen is a little more puzzling to me. As clergy-scandals go, putting somebody else’s words in your own mouth is really pretty small potatoes. Usually the problem is the other way around. The internet really hasn’t changed anything; it has only speeded things up a bit. Although there was an interesting article in last Saturday’s New York Times (which a friend of mine e-mailed to me), featuring an interview with Dr. Richard A. Lischer, the Cleland professor of preaching at the Duke Divinity School, who suggests that one of the reasons that these internet-based “sermon-help” sites are becoming more popular is that many of today’s ministers really haven’t been educated in the liberal arts.
Let me just read what it says here. “As the American work force has become increasingly mobile and people have traded lifelong vocations for experimentation, the seminary has become a place of second-career students. Where once the majority of seminarians had backgrounds in English, philosophy, and history, now many aspiring ministers had first careers in engineering, computers science and accounting. ‘Maybe these tools are more tempting because more students lack a liberal arts background,’ Dr. Lischer said. ‘It makes it more it more difficult to face up to this weekly task of crafting a sermon. It really has changed the way we teach preaching.’ Gone are the days of the sermon as a theological treatise, essay or speech. Most seminaries today emphasize that a sermon, going back to the Latin root of that word, is a conversation.”
But regardless of whether you think of a sermon as a speech or a conversation, preachers are commanded to proclaim the Gospel, not to copyright it. We are charged to “preach the truth in love,” to speak the truth to power, to spread the Good News to every corner of every land...and the accepted standards of “fair use” in this Great Commission are really pretty liberal. Preachers steal from one another with impunity, and have from time immemorial. Jesus himself stole the Golden Rule from the Rabbi Hillel, and his successors have been doing unto others as they would have others do unto them ever since. Usually we attribute, when we can remember where we heard a particular turn of phrase ourselves in the first place, but even then we are often simply quoting something that was borrowed from someone else.
When it comes to religion, there really aren’t that many original ideas; and Woody Allen’s quip aside, that he was once thrown out of college for cheating on his Metaphysics exam by looking into the soul of the student sitting next to him, originality really isn’t the point. The purpose of preaching is to evoke an experience, an insight, a fresh manifestation of a very ancient truth. It’s all about the message, not the messenger, and our ability to hear and understand it, rather than giving proper credit to whoever may have originally said it in just that particular way. Stand-up comedians intuitively understand this principle as well. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but there are no old jokes, there are only fresh audiences. The laugh is in the delivery; the set-up and the punch-line are only means to an end.
Within an academic setting, plagiarism is generally defined as copying another writer’s words or ideas, and presenting them as your own. It sounds relatively straightforward, and in most cases it is. A lot of times, especially on the undergraduate level, students inadvertently plagiarize because they simply don’t understand the difference between “research” and “analysis,” between reading and thinking about what one has read. No one has explained to them how to quote, how to footnote, how to distinguish between the opinions of other writers and their own opinions on a subject, or even how to agree with the interpretation of another scholar without pretending to have thought of everything yourself.
Of course, there are other students who simply cheat: who go on-line to one of the standard internet sites like “cheathouse.com” in search of a paper that sort of fits the assignment, and then try to tweak it enough (typically by dumbing it down) in order to be able to pass it off as their own. Every professor I know has at least one story about something like this: about roommates who turn in identical papers and the like; and some of them go to elaborate lengths to try to ferret them out. The same search engines which make it easy for a student to steal a paper also make it relatively easy for professors to identify them; digital technology is a two-edged sword, and I always liked to remind my students of this fact at the start of every semester, as well as pointing out to them the consequences of being caught, and suggesting that for the same amount of thought and effort required to successfully “beat the system,” they would do just as well to complete the assignment “the old-fashioned way.” Ultimately, the only people they were cheating were themselves; what’s the point of paying all this money for a college education, if you aren’t going to bother to learn anything while you’re here?
But the most annoying students of all were the ones who thought that they could avoid the problem of plagiarism altogether simply by refusing to do any research in the first place. You have to admit, there’s a certain logic to this approach. It’s almost impossible to steal someone else’s ideas when you never even bother to open a book yourself.
Of course, once one leaves academia behind, and moves out into the “real world,” these boundaries are much less clearly defined. How many successful managers and executives do you suppose there are in this world, who have basically made their careers out of taking credit for the brilliant ideas of their more talented subordinates? I know it sounds mercenary, but properly done, this is what leadership is all about. Good leaders gather talented people around them, and provide them with the opportunity to put their ideas into practice; they give credit where credit is due, while at the same time benefiting from their own ability to recognize good ideas and reward them.
Or consider the job of the celebrity ghostwriter, or their less-celebrated cousins, the political speechwriter. There was a great line in a recent episode of “The West Wing” which really brought this all into focus for me. A television reporter asks President Bartlett whether he’s read the book of one of his political opponents, and he replies “I will when he does.” Apart from chuckling at the obvious surface meaning, I had to ask myself: who was responsible for that brilliant bit of political repartee? The fictional character Josiah Bartlett, or the actor who portrays him, Martin Sheen? What about Aaron Sorkin, who created the series and is its executive producer (as well as listed in the credits as writing the teleplay)? Or should we look to story editor Laurie Glasser, or maybe creative consultant and former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers? And does it really matter? -- after all, it’s only television. A little Wednesday evening entertainment....
Of course, sometimes life imitates art. Last September 20th President George W. Bush delivered a nationally-televised speech to a joint session of Congress in which he declared an open-ended war against international terrorism, and in the same breath redefined his identity as a world leader. But the actual text of the speech itself was in fact written by three White House speech writers: Michael Geerson, Matt Scully, and John McConnell, along with input from Presidential Advisor Karen Hughes and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and a handful of less-significant tweaks from the likes of Dick Cheeny, Colin Powell, and various other members of the Administration. Dubya’s only real contribution to the manuscript was basically to take a black “Sharpie” marker and cross out all of the big words. [My source for all this, by the way, is D. T. Max’s article “The Making of the Speech: the 2988 words that changed a presidency,” which appeared in the October 7th, 2001 issue of the New York Times Magazine].
But my question, of course, is this: are we talking about leadership here, or merely a very sophisticated form of plagiarism? And what is the difference, if any, from paying a team of highly-skilled professional speech writers, in aggregate, probably hundreds of thousands of dollars a year (of taxpayers’ money) to help you sound like you know what you’re talking about, and offering your roommate twenty bucks to write your History 201 paper for you?
Underlying these nagging little questions are two related issues of a more profound, theological nature. What is the real source of our “inspiration,” the “origin” of all of our “original” ideas? And likewise, what gives authors their “authority,” the credibility that makes their ideas worthy of belief? And I’m thinking now specifically of my own “authority” as a preacher, and of the awesome challenge and responsibility of coming up with something original to say to all of you, week after week after week.
Not long ago I read a posting to one of my internet CHAT-groups, which said that the secret of effective preaching is “to say what you mean, to mean what you say, and to try not to be too mean when you say it.” This was written by one of my ministerial colleagues, who (if memory serves) was actually quoting a friend of theirs. But I don’t really recall who it was, and while I could have probably tried to look it up, late last night it just didn’t seem worth the time or the hassle of searching through several hundred deleted e-mails just so that I could attach a specific name to those particular words this morning. The idea itself is either true or it’s not (maybe “meaningful” is a better term), and it really doesn’t matter who originally said it, because its authority doesn’t depend upon the identity of its author. But I found it inspiring, and so I’m repeating it here today, in the hope that maybe some of you will be inspired too.
And that’s the way it works. Sometimes I get to borrow from my colleagues, and sometimes my colleagues get to borrow from me. And at the end of the day, the only thing that really matters, is that some of you at least go home from here with something worth thinking about for the rest of the week. And that, I suspect, is challenge enough for any preacher....
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday April 7th, 2002
***
I can’t imagine that any of you have been following this particular news item as closely as I have, but out in the suburbs of Detroit there is an Episcopal Priest who has just been suspended from his job for 90 days by his Bishop after he was accused of plagiarizing significant portions of his sermons off of the internet. This is the second case like this to come up in the past few months; last October, the Senior minister of a 1600-member Presbyterian Church in Clayton, Missouri resigned his pulpit after confessing to a similar transgression.
Of course, clergy aren’t the only ones afflicted by the temptation to copy somebody else’s work and pass it off as their own. It has also recently come to light that two of America’s most prominent, popular historians -- Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin -- have both been guilty of lifting passages verbatim from the published writings of other historians, and including them without attribution in best-selling books of their own. At least initially, Ambrose and Goodwin both attributed their oversight to sloppy note-taking -- which is to say, they each claimed that their lack of attribution was actually the result of a lack of oversight over their research assistants, who had inadvertently neglected to indicate that the passages in question were, in fact, direct quotations rather than paraphrased summaries. Both have apologized, without really admitting to any serious wrong-doing, and both I’m sure will continue to enjoy long and successful careers as TV pundits and celebrity commentators.
The situation involving the two clergymen is a little more puzzling to me. As clergy-scandals go, putting somebody else’s words in your own mouth is really pretty small potatoes. Usually the problem is the other way around. The internet really hasn’t changed anything; it has only speeded things up a bit. Although there was an interesting article in last Saturday’s New York Times (which a friend of mine e-mailed to me), featuring an interview with Dr. Richard A. Lischer, the Cleland professor of preaching at the Duke Divinity School, who suggests that one of the reasons that these internet-based “sermon-help” sites are becoming more popular is that many of today’s ministers really haven’t been educated in the liberal arts.
Let me just read what it says here. “As the American work force has become increasingly mobile and people have traded lifelong vocations for experimentation, the seminary has become a place of second-career students. Where once the majority of seminarians had backgrounds in English, philosophy, and history, now many aspiring ministers had first careers in engineering, computers science and accounting. ‘Maybe these tools are more tempting because more students lack a liberal arts background,’ Dr. Lischer said. ‘It makes it more it more difficult to face up to this weekly task of crafting a sermon. It really has changed the way we teach preaching.’ Gone are the days of the sermon as a theological treatise, essay or speech. Most seminaries today emphasize that a sermon, going back to the Latin root of that word, is a conversation.”
But regardless of whether you think of a sermon as a speech or a conversation, preachers are commanded to proclaim the Gospel, not to copyright it. We are charged to “preach the truth in love,” to speak the truth to power, to spread the Good News to every corner of every land...and the accepted standards of “fair use” in this Great Commission are really pretty liberal. Preachers steal from one another with impunity, and have from time immemorial. Jesus himself stole the Golden Rule from the Rabbi Hillel, and his successors have been doing unto others as they would have others do unto them ever since. Usually we attribute, when we can remember where we heard a particular turn of phrase ourselves in the first place, but even then we are often simply quoting something that was borrowed from someone else.
When it comes to religion, there really aren’t that many original ideas; and Woody Allen’s quip aside, that he was once thrown out of college for cheating on his Metaphysics exam by looking into the soul of the student sitting next to him, originality really isn’t the point. The purpose of preaching is to evoke an experience, an insight, a fresh manifestation of a very ancient truth. It’s all about the message, not the messenger, and our ability to hear and understand it, rather than giving proper credit to whoever may have originally said it in just that particular way. Stand-up comedians intuitively understand this principle as well. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but there are no old jokes, there are only fresh audiences. The laugh is in the delivery; the set-up and the punch-line are only means to an end.
Within an academic setting, plagiarism is generally defined as copying another writer’s words or ideas, and presenting them as your own. It sounds relatively straightforward, and in most cases it is. A lot of times, especially on the undergraduate level, students inadvertently plagiarize because they simply don’t understand the difference between “research” and “analysis,” between reading and thinking about what one has read. No one has explained to them how to quote, how to footnote, how to distinguish between the opinions of other writers and their own opinions on a subject, or even how to agree with the interpretation of another scholar without pretending to have thought of everything yourself.
Of course, there are other students who simply cheat: who go on-line to one of the standard internet sites like “cheathouse.com” in search of a paper that sort of fits the assignment, and then try to tweak it enough (typically by dumbing it down) in order to be able to pass it off as their own. Every professor I know has at least one story about something like this: about roommates who turn in identical papers and the like; and some of them go to elaborate lengths to try to ferret them out. The same search engines which make it easy for a student to steal a paper also make it relatively easy for professors to identify them; digital technology is a two-edged sword, and I always liked to remind my students of this fact at the start of every semester, as well as pointing out to them the consequences of being caught, and suggesting that for the same amount of thought and effort required to successfully “beat the system,” they would do just as well to complete the assignment “the old-fashioned way.” Ultimately, the only people they were cheating were themselves; what’s the point of paying all this money for a college education, if you aren’t going to bother to learn anything while you’re here?
But the most annoying students of all were the ones who thought that they could avoid the problem of plagiarism altogether simply by refusing to do any research in the first place. You have to admit, there’s a certain logic to this approach. It’s almost impossible to steal someone else’s ideas when you never even bother to open a book yourself.
Of course, once one leaves academia behind, and moves out into the “real world,” these boundaries are much less clearly defined. How many successful managers and executives do you suppose there are in this world, who have basically made their careers out of taking credit for the brilliant ideas of their more talented subordinates? I know it sounds mercenary, but properly done, this is what leadership is all about. Good leaders gather talented people around them, and provide them with the opportunity to put their ideas into practice; they give credit where credit is due, while at the same time benefiting from their own ability to recognize good ideas and reward them.
Or consider the job of the celebrity ghostwriter, or their less-celebrated cousins, the political speechwriter. There was a great line in a recent episode of “The West Wing” which really brought this all into focus for me. A television reporter asks President Bartlett whether he’s read the book of one of his political opponents, and he replies “I will when he does.” Apart from chuckling at the obvious surface meaning, I had to ask myself: who was responsible for that brilliant bit of political repartee? The fictional character Josiah Bartlett, or the actor who portrays him, Martin Sheen? What about Aaron Sorkin, who created the series and is its executive producer (as well as listed in the credits as writing the teleplay)? Or should we look to story editor Laurie Glasser, or maybe creative consultant and former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers? And does it really matter? -- after all, it’s only television. A little Wednesday evening entertainment....
Of course, sometimes life imitates art. Last September 20th President George W. Bush delivered a nationally-televised speech to a joint session of Congress in which he declared an open-ended war against international terrorism, and in the same breath redefined his identity as a world leader. But the actual text of the speech itself was in fact written by three White House speech writers: Michael Geerson, Matt Scully, and John McConnell, along with input from Presidential Advisor Karen Hughes and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and a handful of less-significant tweaks from the likes of Dick Cheeny, Colin Powell, and various other members of the Administration. Dubya’s only real contribution to the manuscript was basically to take a black “Sharpie” marker and cross out all of the big words. [My source for all this, by the way, is D. T. Max’s article “The Making of the Speech: the 2988 words that changed a presidency,” which appeared in the October 7th, 2001 issue of the New York Times Magazine].
But my question, of course, is this: are we talking about leadership here, or merely a very sophisticated form of plagiarism? And what is the difference, if any, from paying a team of highly-skilled professional speech writers, in aggregate, probably hundreds of thousands of dollars a year (of taxpayers’ money) to help you sound like you know what you’re talking about, and offering your roommate twenty bucks to write your History 201 paper for you?
Underlying these nagging little questions are two related issues of a more profound, theological nature. What is the real source of our “inspiration,” the “origin” of all of our “original” ideas? And likewise, what gives authors their “authority,” the credibility that makes their ideas worthy of belief? And I’m thinking now specifically of my own “authority” as a preacher, and of the awesome challenge and responsibility of coming up with something original to say to all of you, week after week after week.
Not long ago I read a posting to one of my internet CHAT-groups, which said that the secret of effective preaching is “to say what you mean, to mean what you say, and to try not to be too mean when you say it.” This was written by one of my ministerial colleagues, who (if memory serves) was actually quoting a friend of theirs. But I don’t really recall who it was, and while I could have probably tried to look it up, late last night it just didn’t seem worth the time or the hassle of searching through several hundred deleted e-mails just so that I could attach a specific name to those particular words this morning. The idea itself is either true or it’s not (maybe “meaningful” is a better term), and it really doesn’t matter who originally said it, because its authority doesn’t depend upon the identity of its author. But I found it inspiring, and so I’m repeating it here today, in the hope that maybe some of you will be inspired too.
And that’s the way it works. Sometimes I get to borrow from my colleagues, and sometimes my colleagues get to borrow from me. And at the end of the day, the only thing that really matters, is that some of you at least go home from here with something worth thinking about for the rest of the week. And that, I suspect, is challenge enough for any preacher....
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 2:43 PM
