With a preface by John Milbank, one of the world’s most distinguished theologians, this book addresses Radical Orthodoxy; the connections between the Hebraic and the Hellenic traditions; the fallacy of both liberal and reactionary assumptions concerning the Second Vatican Council; Catholicism as, and as more than, Evangelical, Charismatic and liberal; Catholic imaginative writing, and anti-Catholicism as an imaginative stimulus, in Tudor and Stuart England; Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene and Waugh; a Catholic defence of the Confessional State, including the Act of Settlement; the more recent works of Dr Edward Norman; the problems with, and the opportunities for, the Anglican Ordinariate, as well as the left-wing reasons why Parliament should in any case say no to women bishops in the Church of England; and the left-wing defence of Opus Dei.
Apparently we are to get a sequel to this prestigious tome shortly. Self published again, naturally, because no self respecting or halfway respecting publisher would go anywhere near the proven fraud, serial liar and clinically ill David Lindsay. This book? Well if you've ever read his blog you'll know what to expect. One "commenter" on his blog described him as a "scholar who someone crossed oceans to meet". That made me laugh. Other reviewerson this site are nearer the mark. HNM
Is there a worse book out there in the marketplace? Seems unlikely as this is the bottom of the market, a self-published vanity work that the author paid for. It's a terrible book even more than you'd expect. The author is a hopeless writer, turgid and functionally illiterate. His ignorance of politics, philosophy, theology and history are so gaping it's a car-crash of a book. Sad really, because Lindsay hasn't got anything else in life. He's now in his mid-30s, uneployed and unemployable whose stupidity is the only exceptional thing abiut hm. He got expelled by one Durham college and faked his CV by pretending to be an academic at another. That got him sacked after 2 weeks as unpaid blogger at the Telegraph. All he's got now is a vanity press and a host of imagimary friends.
David Lindsay is famous at Durham for his stupidity which he confirms with this unreadable, illiterate and paranoid volume. You might wonder how an academic could write books like this. The answer is that Lindsay is no academic, that's a fraud.
Hard to imagine there will be a worse book published this year, even at this end of the market, the vanity press. Lindsay's blog is well-known for fantasy, paranoia and fraud and this book is even worse. He has no clue how to write a sentence and his lack of education is all too obvious. That must be the reason why he continues with his embarrassingly obvious scam of pretending to be an academic when in fact he is unemployable and his schemes are wittily exposed by Palatinate, the Durham newspaper.
I was surprised at the tenor of some of these reviews, as I have been a lurker on Mr L's blog site for a while. But having scanned the book, I must confess to also being a little disappointed. The prose is typically wooden (something forgiveable on a blog, but surprising on a book which has presumably been professionally edited? Then again self published so maybe not) and the argument a little impenetrable in parts One of the previous reviews notes that the author fancies himself as a bit of a contrarian, and I agree. Again, forgiveable on a one sided blog, but not for a would-be professional book. Sadly underwhelming.
