So apparently there's this attempted hatchet job of a book about Scott Hahn.

I've been reliably informed that it is a padded version of a doctoral dissertation by some assistant professor.

I have also been reliably informed that it is, like many dissertations, Not Good At All. 

I know that without reading it.

Gasp--that's not fair!

Normally, yes.

But all rules have exceptions, and here's one: any religious tome that has an insult in the title is candidly admitting to you that it is Not Good At All.

And as sure as the Almighty made lots and lots of beetles, this one flings the classic insult "fundamentalist."

As the philosopher Alvin Plantinga memorably put it, "fundamentalist" just means "sumbitch":

 We must first look into the use of this term ‘fundamentalist’. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like ‘son of a bitch’, more exactly ‘sonovabitch’, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) ‘sumbitch’. When the term is used in this way, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel obliged first to define the term?) 

Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of ‘fundamentalist’ (in this widely current use): it isn’t simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more like ‘stupid sumbitch’ (or maybe ‘fascist sumbitch’?) than ‘sumbitch’ simpliciter. It isn’t exactly like that term either, however, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend on who is using it. 

In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. 

The explanation is that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase ‘considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.’ The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like ‘stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine’. 

--Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: 2000),  245.

Thus, to summarize: some guy with tenure at a small college devoted his dissertation to venting about that "stupid sumbitch" Scott Hahn. And then he gussied it up a bit for a wider audience. 

(Re-)publish or perish!

Truly a work destined for Dollar Tree's shelves, right next to the remainders from failed politicians paid to have someone ghostwrite about My Vision For America.

The trees that died for books by Harry Reid and Tim Pawlenty... And the academic equivalent of an "I HATE THAT GUY" Reddit page joins them--albeit in a much tinier print run.

The real scandal is that someone handed the guy a doctorate for it, but it's not my alma mater, so whatever. 

The correct response to this trivial ankle-biter is to not boost the signal. And that includes not linking to the debunkings of the, uh, work, either. Anything else will only boost the print run, and encourage more of the same.