This study examines theological dissertations by international students accepted by major Austrian universities and shows that academic incompetence, plagiarism, and negligent supervision are seriously damaging theological institutions – in Europe and abroad. Some Catholic priests from developing countries receive theological doctorates in Austria by submitting substandard dissertations. Overwhelmed by culture shock and lacking proper academic guidance, these students resort to copying and manipulating data. Many go on to become church leaders at home. This study addresses the damage done by deficient dissertations.

This book demonstrates that the principles of textual criticism—borrowed from the fields of classics and medieval studies—have a valuable application for plagiarism investigations. Plagiarists share key features with medieval scribes who worked in scriptoriums and produced copies of manuscripts. Both kinds of copyists—scribes and plagiarists—engage in similar processes, and they commit distinctive copying errors. When committed by plagiarists, these copying errors have probative value for making determinations that a text is copied, and hence, unoriginal. To show the efficacy of the newly proposed techniques for proving plagiarism, case studies are drawn from philosophy, theology, and canon law.

The question of how seriously to take literature has vexed philosophers throughout the centuries. Are the stories we write merely noble lies told to hold society together? A means of comic detachment from a tragic world? Mimicry of transcendent truths? Potent acts of self-realization? From the Socratics to the Romantics, all of these opinions and more have been offered. In a pop-culture age in which we live out of the stories we tell, our culture needs a clear answer. In this masterful overview of the Western literary tradition, Patrick Downey traces how seriously philosophers and writers across the centuries, from Plato to Kierkegaard, have taken humanity’s attempts at self-authorship in tragedy and comedy. These attempts, Downey argues, only find resolution in history’s most significant work of literature: the Bible. Setting all other literature in its right place, the Bible and the gospel it proclaims take us beyond literature to the true story of reality, providing what the philosophers and poets have sought for all along: a serious comedy.