Painting Fakes

Reading and blogging on the dreams and visions of Gary Johns over the weekend made me think, not for the first time, of one of my favourite little pieces of arcane literature. When my family emigrated from England in 1967, the Australian Immigration Department gave us a little booklet called Australia: Land of Surprises.   This was specifically written for English immigrant children by a person called Carol Odell, with illustrations by Emilie Beuth, to cushion us from the culture shock we would experience in this strange new land.  The book opens with a grand promise. Australia: What does it make you think of first? Kangaroos, sheep and the wide, open spaces?  If it does, this book is going to be full of surprises; but, when you have read it, you will know what Australia is really like. It then lists 31 surprising facts about Australia.  Some of these were indeed surprising to us.  Some would also have been quite surprising to long-standing Austra...

This weekend's edition of The Australian included an lengthy extract from Gary Johns' new book Aboriginal Self-Determination: The Whiteman's Dream .   Johns was a minister in the Keating Government and since leaving parliament has researched and written extensively on Aboriginal issues as an associate professor at the Institute of Public Policy. Johns is addressing a very real and urgent problem of public policy: why are so many Aboriginal people, particularly those in remote areas, living in such dire poverty?  However, on the strength of this extract (perhaps the whole book is better) his analysis of this problem is stale and deeply flawed. What Johns has done is work out who's to blame.  It's the leftist intellectuals (white men, in his telling of the tale) who pushed and championed the policy of Aboriginal self-determination.  The Australian loves this stuff.  At least a couple of times a year they trot out another white man to say something simil...

I was thinking of calling this last article in my Lives of Jesus series the Conclusion, but that would seem to imply that I was about to give you the answer.  Sorry.  You'll have to work that one out for yourselves.  But what I'd like to do is share some thoughts that have been developing over the last three months as I've read or re-read the various books one after another. The single statement that impressed me the most was this one from Albert Nolan . We cannot deduce anything about Jesus from what we think we know about God; we must now deduce everything about God from what we know about Jesus....  To say now suddenly that Jesus is divine does not change our understanding of Jesus, it changes our understanding of divinity.... If we claim to be Christians - followers of Jesus as the Christ - then he should be at the centre of our faith.  Everything else should flow from him.  Yet so often Christianity starts somewhere else.  Most of...

I have written before about how little our media understand the Westminster system of democracy.  Now we find that Queensland's Liberal National Party opposition doesn't get it either. The LNP is notorious for rotating its leadership.  Most of the current MPs seem to have been leader or deputy, or tried to get themselves elected to these roles, over the last few years.  Yet despite this obvious wealth of leadership experience, they have decided to draft in a leader from outside - Brisbane's popular Lord Mayor Campbell Newman.  Unfortunately for him (but probably fortunately for the rest of us) you can't be Opposition Leader in our State Parliament without being elected as a Member first.  So while Newman goes about the tedious business of getting pre-selected and then elected to the currently Labor-held seat of Ashgrove, Jeff Seeney will keep the seat warm for him - as he says "represent him in the Parliament".  I thought you were representing us, Jef...

At last, at the end of this little series of reviews , we get to a writer evangelicals can feel safe with.  Not too safe, though! Philip Yancey is more a journalist and writer than a serious scholar, although he's no fool.  He's a popular writer of books on spiritual issues - Where is God When it Hurts about the problem of pain, What's So Amazing About Grace? about...yes, you guessed it, and so on.  His books can be found in great numbers in conservative Christian bookshops.  He has an easy, popular writing style, free of jargon, but he reads widely and deeply and brings insights from a diverse and often surprising range of sources.  The Jesus I Never Knew was published in 1995, around the same time as Marcus Borg's Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time and Robert Funk's Honest to Jesus , in the midst of the ferment caused by the work of The Jesus Seminar.  You'd hardly know it.  None of the controversy is mentioned, and a brief (out of ...

For the last little while I've been enjoying a couple of Flaming Lips albums - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and more particularly At War with the Mystics.   How these guys managed to slip by me for so long I'm not sure.  Perhaps the fact that there's a bit of electronica involved would have led me to read reviews and think "that doesn't sound like me".  However, their most recent album is a cover of The Dark Side of the Moon so that got my attention.  They're a clever bunch.  Complex rhythms, interesting melodies, and lyrics that make you think.  My ongoing favourite is called The Sound of Failure .  She's starting to live her life From the inside out The sound of failure calls her name She's decided to hear it out So go tell Britney and go tell Gwen She's not tryin' to go against all them 'Cause she's too scared and she can't pretend To understand where it begins or ends Or what it means to be dead It's jus...

In moving, in a sense, from left to right on the theological spectrum in our adventures with the Lives of Jesus , we have finally arrived at writer who holds an essentially orthodox view of Jesus, although one which has been criticised strongly by some conservative church leaders.  Nicholas Thomas Wright  was until recently Anglican Bishop of Durham in the north of England, and is a celebrated and prolific New Testament scholar.  In this capacity he walks a fine line, on the one hand upholding many of the building blocks of Christian orthodoxy while on the other challenging conventional views of what this theology means.  Many people find him confusing.  He doesn't say what they are used to hearing, but at the same time it's impossible to brand him a "liberal".  In a sense, he sees this confusion as part of his mission.  He says: If church leaders themselves spent more time studying and teaching Jesus and the Gospels, a good many of the other th...

Nothing gets Christian bloggers talking like Universalism, the idea that all people, irrespective of faith, will receive God's mercy in the end.  Recently the debate has fired up again on the back of some very clever pre-publicity by the publishers of a book by Rob Bell called Love Wins.   I haven't read the book - in fact the only people who have so far are those lucky enough to receive advance copies to review - but the debate around its teasers is already fierce. In the small and rather random group of blogs I read, Mr Hackman , Like a Child and the wonderful Richard Beck argue the universalist side, while Luke and Simone among many more hold up the more orthodox end of the debate.  I have to confess that I lean fairly strongly to the universalist side, but I'm not well-read about the subject and it doesn't dominate my thoughts much of the time, at least not consciously.  We'll get to that in a minute. The dialogue, such as it is, seems to me to be pretty...

I've been thinking a lot about dictatorships lately, as we all have with the protests sweeping the Middle East.  First came the good news stories - the rapid and relatively bloodless falls of dictators in Tunisia and Egypt.  Then the not so good news - the grim determination of the Gadaffi regime in Libya to hold on no matter what the cost to the nation as a whole.  Meanwhile other conflicts await resolution - in Yemen, Bahrain, Iran and Morocco just to name a few. I don't know a whole lot about Middle Eastern politics or culture, only a few things I've read and an attentive following of Western media.  But a few things seem clear to me. First of all, our media is very focused on the figureheads of these regimes, like Mubarak and Gadaffi.  There is no doubt that these are (or were) genuinely powerful men, but no-one can rule a country on their own.  A dictatorship is not a rule by one man or woman.  Rather, it is rule by a segment of society whi...

So, this exploration of the the Lives of Jesus has finally got through the deconstructionist forests of The Jesus Seminar (via Funk and Borg ) and we are ready for something closer to a traditional understanding of who Jesus was and is.  Not too close, though.  In Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity we have a classic work of liberation theology.  I first read this book quite a few years ago, and its a delight and an inspiration to come back to it after all this time and find its message still fresh and challenging. Those unfamiliar with liberation theology should look elsewhere for a full explanation, but it emerged in the second half of the 20th century in Catholic communities in the poorer parts of the world - especially in South and Central America, but in Nolan's case South Africa.  Their major contribution to Christian theology was to assert the central importance of the social and political dimensions of Jesus' teaching. Albert Nolan...

I've just realised that it's now over thirty years since I was first let loose on the unsuspecting public as a young Social Work student on my first placement.  I spent most of the first half of 1981 at Brisbane's Royal Childrens' Hospital, supposedly providing social work support to the families of children in the hospital.  In actual fact, I was so shy and underconfident that I spent a lot of time hiding, trying to screw up my courage to approach parents on the ward. I partly thought of this because I just spent two days helping to run a conference for alcohol and drug organisations here in Brisbane.  One of the speakers, a long-time university teacher and researcher, revealed that while she likes her students be capable of really helping people, she often passes them on the basis that at least they won't do any harm.  I think that was probably me - in fact I'm almost certain it was because one of my lecturers told me so at the time.  In hindsight, it might ...