Painting Fakes

I found this book in the library called The Bogan Delusion by David Nichols.  I took it home purely because of the title.  I found that it was not so much a book as a rant, but very entertaining and at times even enlightening. Mr Nichols is an urban planner, teaching at the University of Melbourne.  A few years ago he moved from inner city Melbourne to outer suburban Broadmeadows, one of Melbourne's best known public housing estates and supposed Bogan Central.  With the zeal of the convert, he launches a defence of all things outer suburban against all things inner suburban.  His chief target is the notion of the "bogan", the stereotypical uncultured, hard-drinking, mullett-wearing, uneducated outer suburban Australian, for whom Broadmeadows is supposed to be the natural habitat. His idea is that there is really no such thing as a bogan.  From his description it would be hard to tell because he never really describes clearly what a bogan is, despite hi...

Tomorrow evening is a function celebrating the 25th anniversary of the creation of Queensland Shelter , the State's peak housing organisation.  I helped create it back in 1987, so I get to say a few words.  Here they are, or at least some of them. 1987 was famous in Queensland history as the year the Tony Fitzgerald was commissioned to conduct a 6-week inquiry into police corruption in Queensland.  Less famously, it was also International Year of Shelter for the Homeless.  A few of us formed a State committee, got some money from Brotherhood of St Laurence, did roadshows around the State on housing and homelessness issues.  At the end of 1987 we were quite happy with what we had acheived, but we realised we were still a little short of our objective - ending homelessness in Queensland - so we decided to keep going.  We reconstituted ourselves as Queensland Shelter so we could be part of the nationwide network of Shelter ...

When I was writing about John Shelby Spong's Jesus for the Non-Religious I concluded that he had misread the mood of the times, and that "the growing churches of our time are not the intellectual, post-theistic churches of the likes of Spong and his fellow progressives. They are the booming fundamentalist megachurches of the pentecostal movement, and the bastions of conservative Catholicism promoted by John Paul II and his followers." Then I read Christine Wicker's The Fall of the Evangelical Nation.  Wicker is a religious affairs reporter who spent 17 years writing for the Dallas Morning News, during which she wrote this book.  It was published in 2008, conceived in the wake of George W Bush's re-election as US President supposedly on the votes of evangelical Christians who made up 25% of the US population. These figures are Wicker's first target.  Using data published by evangelical churches themselves, she finds that the true number of active ...

Following on from my review of John Shelby Spong's Jesus for the Non-Religious , here's something more.  I had always thought that atheism and Christianity were incompatible belief systems but  Spong has confounded me by proclaiming himself to be both an atheist and a Christian.  He cites three arguments in support of his atheism, each of which would be worthy of our most radical 21st century atheists.  First of all,  he asserts that science has disproved theism.  The evidence of cosmology shows that there is no God above the sky.  The evidence of paleontology shows that life on earth developed gradually by natural processes.  Our understanding of science in general shows that the processes of physics, chemistry and biology are driven by natural laws which are not amenable to random divine intervention.  Richard Dawkins would certainly be pleased to read such a clear statement of his own views, although a large number of other scienti...

John Shelby Spong retired as Episcopalian (Anglican, for us Aussies) Bishop of Newark in 2001 after 24 years in the role, and has since worked as a freelance author and speaker.  Over the past three decades he has become the most outspoken and controversial advocate for progressive Christianity, reviled by conservative Christians and admired by fellow progressives.  He has taken unorthodox stands on a range of issues, including human sexuality, the status of the Bible and the role of women.  His stance is summed up in the title of another of his books - Why Christianity Must Change or Die. He has written a lot about Jesus over the years but Jesus for the Non-Religious: Recovering the Divine at the Heart of the Human, published in 2007, is his most comprehensive treatment of the historical person at the heart of the Christian faith.  After leading off with his devotion to Jesus, he follows with this. The other (motivation) driving me into this study is ...

Back in the late 70's and early 80's, when Bruce Springsteen was busy becoming one of the biggest rock'n'roll acts on the planet, I didn't really get it.  The biggest problem for me was that the music was such a mess - a noisy, loose band, chaotic arrangements and not a single sign of a prog-rock inspired solo.  I heard the occasional song I liked - like The River with its lovely harmonica and earthy story-telling.  But when I listened to the whole album, the mess got to me again and I gave up. The first hint I got that maybe I was missing something was when someone I respect arrived at a meeting in 2002 full of excitement at just having bought a copy of his new album, The Rising .  Then I read an article about how in each city he visited, he would meet a local community organisation, then promote their work during his show.  Finally I gave myself another listen and bought a cheap copy of The Essential Bruce Springsteen . I was right, there was a lot of...