Biblical Skepticism
The Decline and Fall of Sacred Scripture
by Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker
reviewed by Thomas Banks
There exists in conservative publishing an esoteric set of books which might be described as the "à qui la faute" genre. The method of these books is to identify some contemporary heresy, fashion, or habit of mind, and to trace its lineage back to some distant and disreputable precursor, often with a view towards discrediting both. Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences may be taken as the archetype of this mode of writing, whose offspring are more numerous than one might at first suppose. Anyone acquainted with this order of literature can call to mind examples ranging in quality from Helen Andrews's Boomers to the paranoiac scribblings of obscure Sedevacantists in despairing and self-published paperbacks on the twin bogies of Jews and Freemasons.
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Thomas Banks lives in North Carolina and teaches online at the House of Humane Letters. His poems, translations, and essays have appeared in First Things, The New English Review, Quadrant, The Imaginative Conservative, Crisis Magazine, The St. Austin Review, and other publications.
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