Talk:James D. Bales

Rough start
This article currently contains many errors in spelling and grammar. More importantly, it also cites no significant scholarship. However, I happen to know that such scholarship exists, so I won't delete the page. Instead, I call for others to help with the revision process. Bales's racists comments about Martin Luther King should be included here as well. Josh a brewer (talk) 02:32, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

While I am not an English teacher I did manage to get the text as written through Microsoft Word spelling and grammar check with only one error (likability, which I'll correct). It would be nice to know what is at issue here. It would also be nice to know if this scholarship exists what it is, especially since I mention the lack of biographical scholarship on Bales in my article. As mentioned in my article my approach was to attempt to compensate for this lack of direct scholarship on Bales personally by referring to the legacy of Bales' scholarship himself and citing some scholarship on the National Education Program, whose publications were a major portion of Bales' life's work. Other than that and the journal article by Haymes I could not find anything better. I did add a couple of external links, although they are brief. I did mention his book "The Martin Luther Story ..." whose title strongly hints at its controversial nature. From this comment I suspect that to be considered significant by Josh the scholarship on Bales must be aggressively and unambiguously critical.Okiedave1957 (talk) 05:47, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

POV
This article seems to be rather unsubtly slanted in Bales' favor, indeed going out of its way to praise him. Stonemason89 (talk) 05:21, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

When I first read this comment I wondered if he could have seriously read and been referring to this article. It contains very little on Bales that isn't universally acknowledged, except for the excerpt from Don Haymes' article. I gave Haymes' article prominence because he opposed Bales in general and in so many of the controversies they both were involved in, as described in the referenced article. It shows that, while many things were controversial about Bales, not only the facts I refer to but the attributes I mention were acknowledged by friend and foe alike. I suspect Stonemason's standards on Bales writeups for "objectivity" are basically the sames as Josh's for "significance". Okiedave1957 (talk) 06:07, 26 October 2011 (UTC)

I would argue that the article is slanted with a bias denigrating Bales. The only article quoted is by an admitted opponent. Mention is made of his 64 published books, but little is said about their character or content, except giving the titles to two books and emphasizing the one book about Martin Luther King used to criticize Bales. His anti-communist views were well known. (The title of another of his books: "You Can Trust A Communist....To Be A Communist!") But Bales served as a missionary in China (where he contracted one of the medical issues mentioned in the article) and taught in the Bible Department at Harding College, not political science. To make his political views more central than his religious views fails to fairly describe the key motivating issues for Bales. He was also a prolific letter writer, writing "letters to the editor" to many religious newsletters of various denominations, urging the use of Biblical standards for religious decisions. He was widely informed of trends in American Protestant churches. The quote from Haymes' article about "trainloads" of progeny seems especially egregious. This article also footnotes "The Atteberry Affair" without giving any links, when I easily found one using Google: http://www.angelfire.com/alt/americafirst/ChurchesofChrist/Harding_and_the_Atteberry_unformatted.htm. The article ends with a quote from Haymes about Bales influence being broad but not long, yet the article begins with the information that Bales was an influential professor at Harding for nearly 40 years. In the life of an educational institution, just staying employed for 40 years should be considered "long"! Bellmarked (talk) 04:55, 28 April 2013 (UTC)