Painting Fakes

Yesterday's Weekend Australian contains a detailed interview with former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating and a short extract from his new book.  In it, he laments the narrowness of our current political culture, the inability of our politicians (especially his successors in the Labor Party) to tell an overarching story about Australia, where we are heading and our place in the world.  Part of the problem, he says, is that they are too focused on logic and pragmatics at the expense of vision and aesthetics. Friedrich Schiller, the German philosopher, said: "If man is ever to solve the problems of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom."    Romantic and idealistic as that view may seem to some, the thought is revelatory of the fact that the greater part of human aspiration has been informed by individual intuition and privately genera...

So, after John Carroll's existential midrash on the life of Jesus, we return to a more typical type of contemporary midrash , the historical reconstruction.  Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts by John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L Reed represents a detailed forensic examination of historical evidence in the tradition of the Jesus Seminar , of which Crossan was co-chair for a decade.  Crossan is perhaps the more famous of this pair of authors, known for his New Testament scholarship and his reconstructions of Jesus' life and the first century church.  Reed, while lower profile, appears to be just as distinguished in academic terms and specialises in Palestinian archaeology. Within the dual focus of their sub-title, the division of labour seems clear - Reed deals with stones, Crossan with texts. It is the combination of the two which provides the power and fascination of this book.  The archaeology of first century Palestine can't tell us...

So, a few weeks ago I wrote a letter to Julia Gillard , with copies to Chris Bowen and my local member Graham Perrett, outlining the reasons they should not only abandon overseas processing of boat arrivals but the whole mandatory detention system.  I'm still waiting for the reply, aside from a brief acknowledgement from a member of Perrett's staff thanking me for saying what I think.  But blow me down if they haven't gone and done something quite like what I suggested .  All arrivals will be processed in Australia, with those deemed likely to be granted refugee status given bridging visas and allowed to live in the community after basic health and security checks.  At last, a move in a more humane direction! It would be nice to think they listened to me and the thousands of other people advocating a more humane solution.  Sadly, it seems that it's just a stuff up.  The media is even talking about it as the "failure of migration policy".  Both Libera...

To keep the Australian theme going here is another Australian Life of Jesus , The Existential Jesus by John Carroll.  However, this is where the resemblance to  John Dickson ends .   Carroll is a professor of sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne and is not an active church member or a biblical scholar.  Instead, he approaches the story of Jesus through a secular reading group he convenes at the University, which has twice read the Gospel of Mark in its entirety.  He has found the story profoundly affecting and life changing, and this book is the result. Nor is Carroll greatly interested in the Quest for the Historical Jesus, and is scornful of both the idea of Jesus as eschatologocal prophet , and of the Jesus Seminar with their colour-coded sayings.  Not that he doesn't make use of historical research - he leans particularly heavily on Catholic scholar Raymond E Brown - but his intention is quite different from theirs.  This is ...

As a teenager I was fascinated by the story of King David.   It was a part of the Bible I read over and over again.   Looking back on it, I think it’s because David is the most complete and the most human character in the Bible, even including Jesus.   D espite his flaws and his repeated failures he keeps trying to do right and enjoys tremendous success.   Plus, there’s lots of action, plenty of blood and guts and a fair amount of sex. At one point I even wrote an ancient history assignment about King David’s role in Israelite history.   However, I lost marks because of my naïve acceptance of the Biblical accounts as accurate history, my failure to evaluate them as sources. To be fair to my teenage self, back in the 1970s most historians had a fairly generous view of the historicity of Samuel and 1 Kings.   Not that I knew anything about it at age 16, but most critics regarded elements of these stories as reaching back to two narratives w...

It's always good to step outside your normal environment and be exposed to something new.  That's how you learn.  So I let myself be persuaded to go to last night's TWIST (The Word in Song Together) conference.  This is part of a series of events organised by Emu Music , an Australian organisation best known for recording and publishing new worship music but which also runs frequent training events for church music leaders.  That's me, so off I went. The event went for about two hours, split pretty evenly between singing and listening to the featured speaker, Bob Kauflin, a songwriter and worship leader from Sovereign Grace Ministries in the USA.  As you'd expect from a room full of 500 musicians the singing was good, led by a polished (and loud!) pop-rock ensemble.  The songs, and the talk, certainly made me think, but I probably wasn't thinking what the organisers wanted me to think.  I rarely do. The talk was pretty simple, although ...

Christians have a recurring problem over suffering.  Apart from the fact that they actually suffer, which is a problem everyone has, the Christian-specific problem is this: Christians traditionally believe in three things. God is all-powerful, both knowing and being in control of everything that happens in the universe. God is perfectly loving, desiring nothing but good for his/her children and creation. Humans have free will and are able to decide the direction of their own lives, including being able to reject God and to make mistakes. The problem is that these things are logically incompatible, and nothing brings this incompatibility into focus more than suffering.  If God is both loving and all-powerful, why does he allow suffering in the world?  There are two common answers.  One is that the suffering is a result of our misuse of our freewill.  This, however, calls into question either God's power (could God not have designed things so ...