Painting Fakes

This morning in church we read the story of Jesus healing the centurion's slave from Luke 7:1-10.  I found it hard to listen to the sermon because I kept being distracted by the story.  Here's what was distracting me. This story takes place in the village of Capernaum and has three main characters - the centurion's slave, the centurion himself, and Jesus.  The slave is the trigger for the story: ...a centurion's servant, whom his master valued highly, was sick and about to die. Other translations say that the slave "was dear to him".  There's some ambiguity here - was the slave a loved member of his household, or a valuable piece of property?  Either way, what follows in the story indicates that when Jesus is asked to heal this slave it is not seen as an act of service towards the slave, but towards the centurion himself. This is not surprising when you think of who the centurion was.  He was a Roman army officer, roughly equivalent to a capt...

My birthday is long gone and finally the new Richard Thompson CD that I ordered with my birthday money has arrived.  Because it's my birthday I ordered the deluxe version which includes a set of acoustic demos and I'm glad I did because to my mind a band doesn't always add much to Thompson's amazing guitar playing.  I saw him live in Brisbane a few years ago, standing alone on the stage of the Tivoli, and didn't miss the rest of the band for a moment. I must admit though that the new album is a little patchy, and I'm getting more enjoyment out of the one that arrived earlier, Martha Tilston's Lucy and the Wolves.   I caught on to Tilston when I picked up a copy of Milkmaids and Architects in a second hand shop and couldn't understand how anyone could part with it.  If you've never heard her, listen to this beautiful performance of "Music of the Moon".  Lucy is better, if you need to make that kind of comparison. It has a quiet...

I've been really enjoying Australian Observer's coverage of the Afghanistan debate and other such matters.  One of the things he's highlighted is that while our politicians are talking about defeating the Taliban, the Afghani government, with the support of the US Military, is giving Taliban commanders safe conduct to attend negotiations aimed at ending their insurgency and bringing them into the political system. It reminded me of something I learnt way back in undergraduate politics.  Democracy is not secured by the will of the majority, but by the consent of the minority.  You can see this in our recent election dramas.  Despite the rhetoric and posturing, once Labor had secured the votes of enough independents the Liberals accepted that they were once more the Opposition.  They tried to disrupt and block, but only within the bounds of parliamentary procedure.  They kept turning up in Parliament, they debated, they sat down when the speaker told the...

Rupert Murdoch, one of Australia's most valuable exports, has recently taken his private jet to London to deliver the inaugural Baroness Thatcher Lecture .  Here's what he has to say about the woman who was British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. My words tonight will be flavoured by those of Margaret Thatcher herself. We sometimes forget how pithy she is – how wise her thoughts, and how pertinent they remain even though she left office long ago. And we cannot forget that she is no ideologue, but a person of pragmatism, an optimist whose optimism is founded in her faith in the individual.  Hers is a generous spirit, a spirit based in an appreciation of personal potential and not of an impersonal ideology. As she said: "With all due respect to the drafters of the American Declaration of Independence, all men and women are not created equal, at least in regard to their characters, abilities and aptitudes." It was that appreciation of individual aptitude and ab...

I was talking with someone on the Internet about Biblical inerrancy, and said as I often do that I didn't really understand properly what the term meant.  He referred me to a document called the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy .  This document was produced in 1978 at a conference sponsored by a group called the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy.  Its 300 signatories included a number of evangelical luminaries of the time including JI Packer, Francis Schaeffer and RC Sproule.  The same group produced two more statements in succeeding years and the second, The Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics , is a kind of follow up and explanation of the first. The core of the statement is a set of 19 articles, each of which is framed as an affirmation of what the authors believe, followed by a denial of the position they are refuting.  It's a pithy, elegant statement written by some highly intelligent men, and it certainly helped me to...

The news here in Australia is full of the canonisation of the first Australian Saint, Mary MacKillop , founder of the Order of St Joseph.  Being a Protestant, I've never quite got the whole sainthood thing.  We were taught that all of us are saints (sanctified ones) and that this comes about as a result of God's grace.  We were also taught that it's wrong to pray to anyone other than God himself - my evangelical teachers were very big on "there is one God, and one mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ the Righteous" from 1 Timothy 2:5. As a result I've watched the whole thing with mixed emotions - not only bafflement, but pleasure, irony and cynicism. Pleasure because for a change we are celebrating a national hero whose life was dedicated to doing good.  Mary MacKillop was a woman whose mission was to care for poor women and children, found schools and lift people up out of poverty.  She wasn't afraid to take on the church to do so either, and...

For some reason I've been listening to Paul McCartney's Silly Love Songs .   It's one of those songs that refuses to leave once it's in your head, even when you try to drive it out with lashings of punk rock or Pink Floyd. I didn't like this song when it first came out in the mid-1970s.  At the time I thought this was because it was silly and superficial.  I was a very serious teenager.  Now I think I was just too immature to appreciate it.  For a start, it's not as simple as it seems.  There's a lot going on beneath the surface.  A jaunty bass rhythm, a horn section counterpointing with lush strings, interwoven harmonies and counter-melodies.  McCartney was (and is) no fool musically. Then the lyrics provide a joyous piece of self-satire, as well as a cheerful poke in the eye for people like his ex-mate John Lennon who seemed to take the art of pop music a lot more seriously than he did.  He asks, "why not have fun?"...

Over the past week I've been watching, in a half-hearted way, the coverage of the Commonwealth Games in Delhi.  Most of the world, even people in the Commonwealth, take no interest in this little colonial remnant.  Aussies love it because our athletes get to win a lot. So why am I only half-hearted?  I think the main reason is that Australian coverage of the event is so poor.  Australian broadcasters have determined (I'm not sure by what means) that Australian audiences are only interested in watching Australian athletes.  It's not that we just get to see events where Australians are competing.  It's that we only get to see the Australians, full stop.  For instance, an Australian, Fabrice Lapierre, won the mens long jump at these games with a jump of 8.30 metres - a full 60 centimetres shorter than Bob Beamon's 1968 effort .  Was this a surprise or was he the favourite?  Who did he beat?  Did he blow the field away with his fir...

I've spent the last couple of weeks working my way through The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand, a historian from Tel Aviv University.  You couldn't call it an easy read, as although well-written it's very heavy on scholarship, but it's certainly been worth the effort. His basic thesis is that the "Jewish people" is not a long-standing, distinct nation or ethnic group, exiled from its homeland and now returning, but a diverse group of people of varying nationalities united by their religion.  The concept of the Jewish nation was, on his reading, created by the Zionists from the mid 19th century onwards in the context of the rise of "nationalist" ethnic histories around the world and most particularly in Europe.  I'm not in any way qualified to assess his arguments, but I certainly found them compelling.  At risk of oversimplification, let me summarise. 1.  The early stories of Israeli history as presented in the Bible - the sto...

Somewhere around 1971 or 1972 one of my dad's friends gave me a pile of English sports magazines.  It was one of the best presents I ever got, although I think he was just clearing out junk.  There was a set of something which may have been called Football Monthly , and a pile of something that could have been called Sports Illustrated although it didn't have any swimsuit models.  They spanned a period from 1967 through to 1970, including the 1968 Olympics and the 1970 World Cup, both held in Mexico. I read those magazines over and over again,  partly because I would read anything and partly because I loved sport.  I was still young enough not to be blase about the unfolding drama.  The writers speculated about who would win the World Cup and patriotically promoted England's chances.  Then they gushed about the brilliance of the eventual Brazilian winners, and mourned the moments that cost England.  They ran over the form guide for the blu...

My relative and fellow blogger Luke recently floated the idea of an " Abraham line " - anything in Genesis before Abraham could be seen as mythical, anything after essentially historical.  Intense discussion followed. I've been thinking about a different kind of line.  In my late teens we had a guest speaker at our youth group on the subject of "cults". By this term, he meant those minority Christian sects who believe things outside Christian orthodoxy - Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Christadelphians, Seventh Day Adventists and so on.  At one point in the discussion he made a distinction - one of these (I forget which) he regarded as Christian, the others not.  Various books on "cults" were doing the rounds and each of them had a different definition of a cult, and a different list.  Some included the Catholic Church, put in the non-Christian pile because it doesn't teach salvation by grace alone, and because it teaches idolatory in various...