Well it might be good to ask Tony Wills for some proof before dragging James Penton's name through the mud Nathan Nates.
Cabasilas - yes Penton cites A People for His Name a few times in the footnotes. He also gives it a mention in the preface or acknowledgements as being a useful source. But there were a couple of times where he used White's (Willis') ideas where I thought he could have made it explicit. If Penton used some of White's material word for word without attribution however I missed that, and I would be interested in seeing proof.
One idea that Penton uses from White is the thought that Russell's family relations may have affected his doctrine. White argued that since Russell had a close and loving relationship with his father he tended to have a similar benign view of God. He could never imagine such a benevolent father torturing people and this is why he found the hellfire doctrine so repugnant. Penton repeats this same argument without acknowledgement. Of course it could simply be that Penton forgot where he read the idea orginally, or indeed forgot he had read it elsewhere at all and thought he had come up with it himself. This is bound to happen from time to time even in generally sound academic work. It is called unintentional plagiarism and can be overlooked as long as the failure to ackowledge is not blatant, the dependency word for word, or so extensive as to be clearly intentional or at least recklessly careless in the failure to give other researchers their due.
