Political Revolving Doors

From the District of Corruption Cynicism Generator

Former House speaker and unrepentant smoker John Boehner has joined the board of tobacco giant Reynolds American Inc. The former GOP congressman from Ohio is widely known for his cigarette habit — he generally smokes Camel Ultra Lights, which are made by Reynolds — as well as his close ties to the tobacco industry.

He once handed out campaign checks from tobacco interests on the House floor, a move he later said he regretted. [but, obviously, not a lot.]

There is a twist to Boehner’s new corporate gig. He will apparently be helping the company stop kids from smoking, or so says his spokesman.

Boehner Gets a Smokin' New Job, Deirdre Shesgreen, USA Today, Sept. 15, 2016

A Place at the Table for Atheists

Atheism 1 -  Religion 2,978,333

There was an announcement recently that appears not to have been widely circulated so I will let you know that the study of atheism will now be more openly pursued at one university. I say ‘openly’ since I am sure there are courses that touch upon atheism, secularism and non-belief buried among the listings of Phil. Departments and we all know that campuses are full of Godless commies.

Given that a majority of universities have departments devoted to the study of religion and most universities and colleges in the United States were founded by one type of religion or another, one would think that the announcement  does not constitute much of a threat. The situation is generally the same in Canada, although we are blessed with far less of them. Western University, here in London, was founded by an Anglican Bishop and the affiliated colleges, Brescia, King’s and Huron are all religious-based. The latter,  an Anglican establishment, has a large Faculty of Theology and within it, even a Chair in Islamic Studies, the founding and funding of which caused some concern. Which brings me to the Chair.

While the larger number provided above may be off by a little, I think it is correct to say that there is now 1 Chair for Atheism in all of the colleges and universities in North America -  the “Appignani Foundation Chair for the Study of Atheism, Humanism, and Secular Ethics” which will be located soon in some room on the campus of the University of Miami which is looking for someone to fill it. The donor is  Louis J. Appignani who is providing $2.2 million. The focus will be on the subjects mentioned: atheism, humanism and secular ethics.

Since  the word “Atheist” is almost as unpopular as  “Islamist”, the University was understandably reluctant to allow it to appear in the course catalogue. At the last moment, Mr. Appignani refused to capitulate and allow the chair to be labelled the “Chair of Philosophical Naturalism”, but the addition of the words “Humanism” and “Secularism” does serve to deflect some of the attention to more acceptable subjects. Still somewhat nervous, the University made this statement and I am sure they would want me to repeat it for them:

“We didn’t want anyone to misunderstand and think that this was to be an advocacy position for someone who is an atheist,” he said. “Our religion department isn’t taking an advocacy position when it teaches about Catholicism or Islam. Similarly, we’re not taking an advocacy position when we teach about atheism or secular ethics.”

Every year around this time I used to send a taunting email to my nieces, who graduated from Miami, and to their mother (my sister), who is also a huge ‘Cane’s fan, in which I pretended to be rooting for Notre Dame in the upcoming football game. The subject heading has usually been “The Convicts vs The Catholics”. Toward the end of October I will now send one which says “The Atheists vs The Christians” and they are likely to find it even more insulting.

See: “University of Miami Establishes Chair for the Study of Atheism,” Laurie Goodstein, The New York Times,  May 20, 2016.

By the way, perhaps the University should not be too worried about the reaction (at least from the students) since the article above notes that:

The percentage of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has risen rapidly in a short time, to 23 percent of the population in 2014, up from 16 percent in 2007, according to a report by the Pew Research Center. Younger people are even less religious, with 35 percent of millennials saying they identify as atheist, agnostic or with no religion in particular.”

Feral Cats and Dead Birds

From the Culture Wars to the Cat Wars

I have already paid more attention than I intended to the wars waging on campuses and had no intention at all of bringing up the subject of ‘cats’. But, just yesterday a new little kitten showed up under our bird feeder and a few days ago the cat from the house next door wandered away with one of the chipmunks we had been feeding dangling from his mouth.  I have tended to ignore the piles of bird feathers. Perhaps for these reasons I noticed this particular email with the subject heading “The Case Against Cats”. That is the title of an article by Colin Dickey in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Sept. 7, 2016. That is when I learned among other things that:

“The news that house cats are laying waste to wide swaths of biodiversity has not, like revelations about climate change or other ecological evils, led to some kind of scientific consensus about what was to be done. It’s led, instead, to the establishment of two warring camps: the cat people and the bird people. The bird people think that the wholesale slaughter of the world’s bird population is a problem requiring human intervention, namely the banning of feral and outdoor cats, forced sterilization, and euthanization. The cat people are aghast at these solutions, and argue instead that cats, being innate predators, should be allowed to fulfill their natural directive.”

The article is a review of this new book from Princeton University Press: Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer, Peter P. Marra & Chris Santella. From the publisher’s site you will learn that:

“This compelling book traces the historical and cultural ties between humans and cats from early domestication to the current boom in pet ownership, along the way accessibly explaining the science of extinction, population modeling, and feline diseases. It charts the developments that have led to our present impasse—from Stan Temple’s breakthrough studies on cat predation in Wisconsin to cat-eradication programs underway in Australia today. It describes how a small but vocal minority of cat advocates has campaigned successfully for no action in much the same way that special interest groups have stymied attempts to curtail smoking and climate change.”

Some blurbs:
"We know that nature’s theater bristles with industrious carnivores and omnivores--hawks that pluck cardinals right off a bird feeder, squirrels that grab eggs from crows’ nests, and crows that grab babies from squirrels’ nests. What makes free-ranging cats such an exceptionally dangerous threat to birds and other wildlife? The book describes a number of factors."--Natalie Angier, New York Review of Books.

"Cats, most of them unowned free-ranging cats, kill as many as four billion birds in the United States each year. What, if anything, should be done about it? Cat Wars tackles this difficult dilemma. If you are a cat lover, a bird lover, a philosopher, an ethicist, or just anyone interested in gut-wrenching dilemmas, you will find this a gripping book."--Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel.

For the hard and hard-to-believe numbers of deaths caused by cats you can also see: The Impact of Free-ranging Domestic Cats on Wildlife of the United States,” by Scott R. Loss, Nature Communications, Jan. 29, 2013.

The problem of feral felines is a large one. Now you know so my job here is done. For my part, I will start locally with my BB gun and my new NIMBY cat policy.

Tiny Sombreros

Cultural Appropriation 

It is time for me to post a few words again, as promised, and although I am not sure what subject I was going to attempt to write about, my attention has been diverted to the rather large one symbolized now by sombreros. I should have said ‘diverted again’ since I learned about them in March, but before I had acquired  a knowledge of the very basics of blogging. The sombreros have surfaced again - in Australia.

Back in March, with spring being what it is in Maine, some students at Bowdoin College felt like having a party and sent out an email invitation which included pictures of small sombreros. They wanted to play games and have fun and the fuel was to be tequila; hence the sombreros. Perhaps they had already imbibed some for surely they would have realized that they had committed two campus crimes, ethnic stereotyping and cultural appropriation. I was aware of the former, but have to confess, not sufficiently sensitive to the latter.

I wondered for a bit about how such things might be regarded on the campus up the road (from which I am now retired), but then I recalled a recent Christmas party invitation issuing from that institution. The theme was to be ‘Motown’ and one was to come appropriately attired. Fortunately for the sendees, some of the attendees had second thoughts, the costume idea was abandoned and the email did not go viral. I did not risk attending, but one assumes that if songs such as “Sexual Healing” or “Let’s Get It On” were played, the volume was very low, or otherwise the partiers would have been pilloried like the students in Maine and still be standing in stocks outside the library.

Sombrero Solidarity

I am consoled by the fact that there are a few people who are even less sensitive than I, and one of them is the keynote speaker at the Brisbane Writers Festival, Lionel Shriver, who just showed up wearing a sombrero.  The topic was to be “Community and Belonging”, but the speaker focused instead on “Cultural Appropriation” and clearly was not sympathetic to that notion.  An attack ensued, people walked out, the arguments were censored on the Festival website and a “right of reply” session was quickly organized to combat the speaker’s views about rampant political correctness.

Apart from the fact that even Brisbane, Australia is not safe, it is interesting to learn that Lionel is not a male like me and has little excuse for such insensitivity. She changed her name as a teenager, perhaps because she didn’t get the train set for Christmas. Also interesting is her argument which “was especially critical of efforts to stop novelists from cultural appropriation.” Her latest novel has been criticized because she writes about a black woman and she is white. As well, one learns that Chris Cleave, an Englishman, has been attacked because his popular novel is written from the point of view of a Nigerian girl. Apparently members of one ethnic group should not write (even fiction) about the experiences of members of another, plus there is this argument: "It's not always okay if a white guy writes the story of a Nigerian woman because the actual Nigerian woman can't get published or reviewed to begin with," she wrote.” [she being celebrated Australian writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied]. My guess is that that remark will really piss off Lionel because she has clearly not had it easy as a writer. Shriver also makes a good point, which even the very sensitive surely should understand, when she argues that if she couldn’t create characters “Otherwise, all I could write about would be smart-alecky 59-year-old 5-foot-2-inch white women from North Carolina.”

See: “Lionel Shriver’s Address on Cultural Appropriation Roils a Writers Festival,”

Rod Nordland, The New York Times, Sept. 12, 2016.

“US Author Lionel Shriver's Brisbane Writers Festival Speech Prompts Walk-out,”

Nathaniel Cooper, Brisbane Times, Sept. 11, 2016.
Ms Shriver, about whom I knew nothing, appears to be a very interesting individual and I encourage you to check her out.

P.S. I realized as I was typing this that some of these arguments are not new. Almost 50 years ago there was a huge debate over the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,  The Confessions of Nat Turner which was written by a white southerner, William Styron. But, I have digressed enough for today.

Expurgations (2) Illegal Aliens

Undocumented Immigrants

Under discussion here is the phrase “illegal alien”, not any policy issues relating to that subject. Actually the subject of “illegal alien” is likely to disappear even if the phrase does not. Let me explain.

In my attempt to keep you au courant about language issues I indicated to you a few weeks ago that the phrase “automobile accident” is now generally frowned upon and should be avoided. That is now the case with “illegal alien” which is to be replaced  in polite circles with “undocumented immigrant”. The story begins on campus as many language stories do, this time at Dartmouth. A student being assisted by a librarian was apparently looking for material related to immigration matters and noticed that they were typically led to the subject heading “illegal aliens” which, as a formerly “undocumented immigrant”,  she found offensive.

She took the issue to the Dartmouth student group, CoFIRED (Coalition For Immigration Reform, Equality and DREAMers) which is also concerned with such tenets as “intersectionality” and “inter-community.” They then asked the Dartmouth library people to change the heading, only to realize that they were not in a position to do so since such terms are determined by the Library of Congress. The phrase ultimately found its way to the American Library Association where it was decided that it had to go. The resolution to replace the term with “undocumented immigrants” which  was sent to the Library of Congress contains about a dozen Wheras’s and here are a few samples:

“Whereas the terms "illegal" and "alien," when used in reference to people, have undergone pejoration and acquired derogatory connotations, becoming increasingly associated with nativist and racist sentiments;”

“Whereas referring to undocumented immigrants as "illegal" is increasingly viewed as dehumanizing, offensive, inflammatory, and even a racial slur;”

“Whereas college students have petitioned the Library of Congress to retire the subject heading Illegal aliens;

Etc.

The Library of Congress ultimately agreed to move to more neutral subject headings such as “non-citizens” and “unauthorized immigration”.

Although Library of Congress subject headings do change over time, there has been some opposition to this one since it was viewed as being motivated more by political than linguistic correctness.  Representative Diane Black (Republican TN) released the following statement:

“This needless policy change by the Library of Congress embodies so much of what taxpayers find enraging about Washington. By trading common-sense language for sanitized political-speak, they are caving to the whims of left-wing special interests and attempting to mask the grave threat that illegal immigration poses to our economy, our national security, and our sovereignty. My constituents know that illegal immigration by any other name is still illegal, and we should identify it as such. That is why my bill directs the Library of Congress to continue using the term ‘illegal alien’ just as they were previously. Hopefully this bill will give Washington the push needed to stop thinking up the most politically correct ways to describe illegal immigration and start thinking about solutions to address it,”

Soon after in May, four Senators (Ted Cruz being one) wrote a letter accusing the Library of being on an “Orwellian trajectory” and concluded with this statement:
“There is no other way to put this: the Library has bowed to the political pressure of the moment.”

Representative Brown has introduced a bill called the Stopping Partisan Policy at the Library of Congress Act which demands that “illegal aliens” be kept as a subject heading.

I confess that I was not sufficiently sensitive. I assumed that perhaps those included under such a description were mainly objecting to “alien” which can be related to rather scary characters in Japanese sci-fi movies. The term “alien” legally has a long history and refers basically to any foreigner or outsider. “Illegal” as a word also has a long history, but it is now argued that it should not be applied to a person.

In any case, we seem to have come a fair distance. When looking for instances of the phrase historically one often comes up with headlines such as this: “Plans Set to Round Up Wetbacks…” Los Angeles TImes, June 13, 1954.

For sources see:

“The Library of Congress Will Ditch the Subject Heading “Illegal Aliens”, Erin Blakemore, Smithsonian.com, March 29, 2016.
“Another Word for ‘Illegal Alien’ at the Library of Congress: Contentious,” Jasmine Aguilera, The New York Times, July 22, 2016.

“Library of Congress to Stop Using Term “Illegal Alien,” Steve Padilla & Selene Rivera, Los Angeles Times, April 3, 2016.

William Empson's Memory

William Empson’s Memory

If you read my posts about Porson and Chomsky you will know that, having a poor memory, I am interested in those who possess a good one. Empson reportedly did and it is depressing to note that he was also very smart and could have had a career in math if he had not decided to become a literary theorist.  It is additionally depressing to learn that while he was impressing everyone at Cambridge he was still able to have enough fun to get kicked out.

Since the academic doors were closed in England he left for Japan and for a while taught in China. While there, the Japanese invaded China, and Empson and other teachers at northern universities had to flee to the south where they ended up teaching English without any books. The story goes that the lack of resources was not a problem for Empson since he could recall most of what he had read and reproduce it.  Of course, I could not remember the details, but I did have a reference and tracked it down.

In a review of a book by Empson that is edited by John Haffenden there is mention of the fact that there were no books in China from which to teach and “the story reported by Haffenden is that Empson brought cheer to the staff-room by typing out the whole of Shakespeare’s Othello from memory. On another occasion, persuaded by his students, he recited long passages from Milton’s Paradise Lost. His typewriter provided us, totally out of ‘nothing’, with Swift’s A Modest Proposal. In addition, he was very good at providing long verse passages and many people attest to the power of his memory."
This can all be found in the following source: ”The Learning of Strangeness,” The Royal Beasts and Other Works , Empson, William; Haffenden, John. The Times Literary Supplement, Friday,  November 14, 1986; pg. 1272; Issue 4363.

Given that 30 years have passed since that was written, I looked a little further and found that, while Empson did have a phenomenal memory, the tale is not as tall as told. Haffenden has since that time written a biography of Empson and in Vol. I, Among the Mandarins, Chapter 15 has the title ,“Camping Out: China, 1937-1938. It is reported there that “The students were in fact staggered by his [Empson’s] ability to reproduce on his typewriter enormous quantities of poetry, including Shakespeare and Milton, and it is certainly true that he had an extraordinary facility for remembering lyric poetry in particular. His feats of memorial reconstruction are themselves remembered to this day; they have become part of the folklore of the refugee universities.” Haffenden notes, however, that it is likely that Empson did have access to a copy of Othello. Empson never bragged about such things and even said that the Chinese were not greatly impressed with his abilities since they have a tradition of memorizing long texts.

Empson is an unusual  character and if you are more interested in his Cambridge problem than his memory, see the Wikipedia entry. For those who are not fans of literary criticism and prefer scandals, skip Seven Types of Ambiguity and go straight to “Empson and His Several Types of Infidelity,” by Vanessa Thorpe, The Guardian, Oct. 29, 2006. Like our friend Porson described below, he was rather fond of the drink and often unkempt. His ‘neck beard’ is proof of his eccentric nature.

C.S. Lewis’s Memory

While searching for the information above about Empson, I learned that Lewis also was reported to have had a great memory since Empson supposedly said  “he  [Lewis] was the best-read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read.” That quotation appears frequently in the books about Lewis and recently someone pulled them all together and went in search of the original source from Empson. In the course of collecting them, here are some of the remarks discovered about Lewis’s memory:

His anonymous obituarist in the Cambridge Review wrote,‘There seemed to be nothing he had not read—and everything that he had read seemed to be within his reach, ready to be recalled and put to use.

Lewis’s one-time student Derek Brewer, later a Cambridge medievalist and academic publisher, recalled that given any lines from Paradise Lost, Lewis could continue reciting from that point until asked to stop.

Two other eminent students of his, Canadian English professor John Leyerle and the writer and theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, recalled separate occasions on which Lewis allowed himself to be tested by readings from books selected at random from his own library, after which he would he would go on to quote the rest of the page.

While Lewis clearly did have a good memory, the origin of the Empson quotation could not be located. See: “Reader’s Query: William Empson on C.S. Lewis’s Memory,” Paul Tankard, Notes & Queries, Vol. 61, No.4, p.614 Dec. 2014.

The Racket

As the students stream through the gates on the other side of town I have the opportunity to provide you with my favourite generic job description for faculty at a university. As the provider, I acknowledge that I was not successful as an academic and am likely to be charged with being  ‘envious’ by those who were. Who wouldn’t be? I will also quickly add that I know many faculty who work very hard.

The author of the piece that follows was a member of the academy and for years, the editor of The American Scholar. He has produced many books, including one on Envy and one with the great title, Fabulous Small Jews. While he was a faculty member for many years and should know what it was like to have such a job, you may also want to keep in mind that he was probably on the wrong side in all of the culture wars being waged. As well, this description is probably a little dated since one suspects that things are much grimmer these days and that faculty members everywhere do now have real reasons to be unhappy.

    “I had a friend, now long dead, named Walter B. Scott, a professor at Northwestern University whose specialty was theatrical literature, who never referred to university teaching as other than a--or sometimes the--"racket." What Walter, a notably unambitious man, meant was that it was an unconscionably easy way to make a living, a soft touch, as they used to say. Working under conditions of complete freedom, having to show up in the classroom an impressively small number of hours each week, with the remainder of one's time chiefly left to cultivate one's own intellectual garden, at a job from which one could never be fired and which (if one adds up the capacious vacation time) amounted to fewer than six months work a year for pay that is very far from miserable--yes, I'd say "a racket" just about gets it.

     And yet, as someone who came late to university teaching, I used to wonder why so many people in the racket were so obviously disappointed, depressed, and generally demoralized. Granted, until one achieves that Valhalla for scholars known as tenure--which really means lifetime security, obtainable on no other job that I know--an element of tension is entailed, but then so is it in every other job. As a young instructor, one is often assigned dogsbody work, teaching what is thought to be dull fare: surveys, composition courses, and the rest. But the unhappier academics, in my experience, are not those still struggling to gain a seat at the table, but those who have already grown dour from having been there for a long while."

    So far as I know, no one has ever done a study of the unhappiness of academics. Who might be assigned to the job? Business-school professors specializing in industrial psychology and employer/employee relations would botch it. Disaffected sociologists would blame it all on society and knock off for the rest of the semester. My own preference would be anthropologists, using methods long ago devised for investigating a culture from the outside in. The closest thing we have to these ideal anthropologists have been novelists writing academic novels, and their lucubrations, while not as precise as one would like on the reasons for the unhappiness of academics, do show a strong and continuing propensity on the part of academics intrepidly to make the worst of what ought to be a perfectly delightful situation.”

Source: “Civilization and Its Malcontents: Or, Why Are Academics So Unhappy,” Joseph Epstein, The Weekly Standard, May 9, 2005. Read the rest of the essay which is a long review of Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents, by Elaine Showalter.

Mother Teresa

It was not at all my intention on this fine Sunday morning to tackle this subject and for an obvious reason that will soon become apparent, it is not the best day to do so. After reading several headlines such as these - “Mother Teresa Is Made a Saint by Pope Francis” and “Pope Declares Mother Teresa a Saint and Model of Mercy” - why would I feel compelled to be contrary about the canonization of Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu? Or, to put it another way, “Who would be so base as to pick on a wizened, shriveled old lady, well stricken in years, who has consecrated her entire life to the needy and the destitute?  For less obvious reasons I should also steer clear of this topic since I really can’t say that I read those articles, nor do I know much about Catholicism. I should add, however, that my ignorance does not incline me to feel hostile toward Catholics who, I am sure,  would at least tolerate my cartoonish rendering of the Pope, if I had the ability to draw one.  My attitude toward religion can perhaps best be summarized by the fact that I agree with this definition of Faith which is “The quality by which we are enabled to believe that which we know is untrue.” As I said, I was not even interested enough to read the articles.

The problem is that I am a disciple of the late Christopher Hitchens, the creator of the "shriveled old lady’"description above. He also called her a “fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud”, and even worse a “thieving, fanatical Albanian dwarf.” His attitude toward religion is summed up in his book - God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.  By the way, he also said unkind things about Princess Di.

At this point you are probably not likely a fan of the man and are wondering why I am. From this description you might see why:

“The descendants of the great readers I have mentioned are too often merely fluent know-it-alls, of whom Christopher Hitchens might be considered the exemplar. There he is, every week or month, in the Nation, Vanity Fair, the London Review of Books, writing about history, politics, books, public figures, virtually anything that comes down the freeways of our global culture. I personally have seen Christopher Hitchens in public debate while so weary or drunk or both that he can hardly have known whether he was even facing his audience, or whether there was an audience --and yet not a detail of his argument was dropped and not any of his long and well-turned sentences were slurred. His speech, like his writing, is precise, often brilliant, sometimes spellbinding, rarely inelegant; and yet one feels--as with many of his high-journalistic peers--that all this knowledge (or at least all this information) is not really reading-derived, but has been acquired more or less by osmosis, by rubbing elbows with his journalistic peers in Washington, London, New York, Paris, Delhi, Tehran, or wherever. I might note that this fluency is something few Americans seem to possess; perhaps it stems from admirable European secondary education. I might note too that it is mainly those high journalists who seem to command the steadily released energies of their Victorian counterparts, Bagehot, Macaulay, Saintsbury.” p.123 in Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Larry McMurtry.

Plus, Hitchens  generally offers good and solid reasons in his arguments and I wondered what they were in this case.

Although a disciple, I confess to not having read his book about Mother Teresa: The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Since you are unlikely to, I suggest that you look up the Wikipedia entry for Hitchens and in it you will find another link to a thorough analysis of and synopsis of The Missionary Position..., also in Wikipedia. Some of the criticisms of the saintly one are quite serious and go beyond just questioning the ‘miracles’ that are a prerequisite for sainthood. It is argued, among other things,  that perhaps she was more interested in conversion than charity and often less interested in the source of some donations (those, e.g. from Jean-Claude Duvalier and Charles Keating), and ensuring the money was properly used. And, of course, she was not in a position to do much about the population problem.

Given that the sources above are good and that I obviously am not well-read on this subject, I will abandon you here having simply played the contrarian. In the short bit of poking around I did this morning, however, I did discover a couple of Canadian connections that are interesting and which will allow me to end on an impartial note by offering them to you.

Back in the last century, a Canadian priest (Father Kolodiejchuk) was chosen to be the “postulator” (promoter) of the canonization of Mother Teresa and in 2001 he delivered 32,400 pages of documentation to the Vatican. (see: “The Mission: In his 16 Years as a Priest, Father Brian Kolodiejchuk of Winnipeg Has Never Tackled a More High-pressure Job: It is up to Him to Persuade the Vatican to make Mother Teresa a Saint,” Christopher Guly, The Ottawa Citizen, Sept. 2001). One imagines it was positive, although Hitchen’s views were supposedly recorded.

More recently and more negatively, some  Canadian academics have offered their views. Here is an English abstract of the article which they have written:

“The impact of Mother Teresa’s work has no religious or geographical boundaries. In the four parts of this text, we try to understand this phenomenon. We first present the method used to collect the available information and then discuss a few biographical considerations to clarify her mission and the media’s contribution to her popularity. The third part identifies four stumbling blocks on her way to canonization: her rather dogmatic religious views, her way of caring for the sick, her political choices, and her suspicious management of funds that she received. Fourth, we discuss some elements of her life related to beatification, including her “night of faith,” the exorcism to which she was subjected as well as the validity of the miracle attributed to her. In conclusion, we question why the criticism of which she has been the target has been ignored by the Vatican.”

Source: “Les côtés ténébreux de Mère Teresa,” Serge Larivée, Carole Sénéchal, and Geneviève Chénard Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, September 2013; vol. 42, 3: pp. 319-345.
There are other critical articles to offset the positive. See, for example: "Why Mother Teresa is Still No Saint to Many of Her Critics," Adam Taylor, Washington Post, Sept. 1, 2016.

I have faith in Hitchens, but you can decide for yourself.