NATIONAL BRIEFING / NEW YORK
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Neale Donald Walsch, best-selling author of “Conversations with God,” said he unwittingly passed off another writer’s Christmas anecdote as his own in a recent blog post.
As a result, Walsch’s blog on the spirituality website Beliefnet.com has been shut down. The website said in a statement that Walsch had failed to properly credit and attribute material from another author.
Walsch had written about what he described as his son’s holiday concert two decades ago in which children were to hold up letters spelling “Christmas Love.” One of the children held the “m” upside down, so the audience got the message “Christwas Love,” according to the retelling.
Author Candy Chand of Rancho Murieta, Calif., said she stumbled onto Walsch’s post using an Internet search engine. She recognized her own words from her story based on her son’s kindergarten Christmas pageant, which she had copyrighted in 2005. She said it had appeared in book form this Christmas.
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