Painting Fakes

We often hear talk about "the magic of Christmas".  Usually it has something to do with elves and flying reindeer and Santa Claus breaking into your house through the ceiling vent.  However, we shouldn't forget that the original Christmas story (you know, the one with Jesus in it) also features magicians.  Here they are, in the NIV translation of Matthew 2. After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” Herod consults with his scholars and suggests they try Bethlehem, then asks them to report back to him after they have found the child. After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they sa...

And now for something completely different...Soren Kierkegaard was an early/mid 19th century Danish theologian, famous as one of the founding figures of what came to be called existentialism before this philosophical school became associated with atheism in the 20th century.  Kierkegaard trained in theology and toyed with the idea of becoming a pastor in the State Church of Denmark, finally deciding not to follow through.  He also toyed with marriage before breaking off the engagement.  In the end he lived most of his life on the proceeds of an inheritance from his father, acting as a theological and intellectual gadfly, at odds with his church and his society.  Over his life he published a number of theological works  Many were published under fanciful pseudonyms that seemed designed to suggest he was not fully committed to their content, that they were coats he tried on to see how they looked.  The Sickness unto Death is published unde...

We woke up this morning to read about yet another mass shooting in the USA.  In an all too familiar story, a young man with no criminal history has gone on a shooting rampage in a school in Connecticut, killing 26 people including 20 children before turning the the military-style rifle on himself. It's a tragedy for the children and families involved, including the family of the killer who started his rampage by killing his mother and ended it with his own death.  It should also be a political scandal of the first order.  How did an ordinary, and obviously disturbed, young man get his hands on a piece of powerful military hardware?  Why, after so many such killings, are gun laws still unchanged and all these weapons still lying around in suburban homes? It's not often I praise former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, but my American readers should take note of how he responded in a similar situation. On 28 April 1996 a young m...

For over 50 years, up until his death in 2011, John Stott was a leader of the worldwide Evangelical movement.  He was a key author of the Lausanne Covenant on World Evangelisation in 1974 (he was chair of the drafting committee) and central to the subsequent spin-offs and supplementary statements. Stott was an ever-present eminence in my youth, an evangelical authority who was assumed to be right until he could be positively proven to be wrong.  You would be hard put to find such proof - his writings are careful and considered, marshalling evidence before laying out a modest, logical conclusion.  His sermons - to which we listened on cassette tapes - were masterpieces of the art of condensing complex subject matter into four alliterative points for easy recall.  He was not so much an original theologian as a gifted teacher, able to explain complex concepts in simple lay terms. He was a good role model for young evangelicals.  He didn't despise lear...

Most of you will probably be aware that the United Nations Doha Climate Change Conference is lumbering to a close .  Delegates sit in air-conditioned comfort in a country which is perhaps a small foretaste of our future world and struggle to make decisions that are in some way meaningful. As a result, we have been getting updates on the latest findings of climate science, and the results are not pretty.  Data on increases in emissions, rises in sea levels and trends in average global temperatures are all worse than expected.  Melting permafrost adds an element to warming that most models didn't include because of previously inconclusive evidence.  Climate scientists are pessimistic about our ability to acheive the objective of keeping warming to 2 degrees celsius by 2100, and 4 degrees is being discussed.  A recent World Bank report suggests the human consequences of such a rise would be catastrophic.  Here's a bit of what they say. Even with th...