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Showing posts from December, 2014

The Subversion of Christianity

Reading Leo Tolstoy's religious writings earlier this year made me want to have another go at reading Jacques Ellul's The Subversion of Christianity.   I began to read this book some years ago, only to find that the copy in my hands was a misprint and half the text was missing.  Life intervened, and it took Tolstoy to remind me of it. In some ways, Ellul was a French equivalent to the Englishman CS Lewis.  Like Lewis he was a prominent Christian intellectual of more or less orthodox Protestant views.  Like Lewis, he had a depth of theological knowledge but was mostly self-taught (although Ellul did complete most of a theology degree before the Second World War intervened) while pursuing an academic career in a different discipline (Ellul in sociology, Lewis in literature). Of course there are also differences.  Lewis wrote for a popular audience and much of his writing is highly accessible.  Ellul was far more "intellectual" and his writing can be dense and diffi

The Little Drummer Boy

It seems that this Christmas I can't get away from renditions of The Little Drummer Boy .  Here is the one I enjoyed most, from Walk Off the Earth. I don't really know what's with the dogs.  If you prefer something more traditional here's an  a capella  version by Pentatonix. In case you haven't had it drummed into you by years of repetition over shopping centre sound systems and in Christmas concerts and pageants, the lyric goes like this: Come they told me, pa rum pum pum pum A new born King to see, pa rum pum pum pum Our finest gifts we bring, pa rum pum pum pum To lay before the King, pa rum pum pum pum,  rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum, So to honour Him, pa rum pum pum pum,  When we come. Little Baby, pa rum pum pum pum I am a poor boy too, pa rum pum pum pum I have no gift to bring, pa rum pum pum pum That's fit to give a king, pa rum pum pum rum pum pum pum, rum pum pum pum, Shall I play for you, pa rum pum pum pum,

The Uses and Abuses of Fear

A few weeks ago I wrote about the idea of "lone wolf terrorism" .  Now we have had our own version of the same thing, a terrifying and spectacular act of violence in which an Iranian immigrant called Man Horan Monis held a group of staff and customers hostage in a cafe in Sydney's Martin Place for 16 hours.  The standoff ended with Monis' death and that of two of his hostages. In its wake, government leaders and commentators have been asking the same question I did.  Was Monis a terrorist, or was he just a criminal?  On the one hand, he had a history of espousing radical Islamism and claimed to be acting in support of the Islamic State.  On the other hand, he didn't even have an IS flag to display, and had to ask police negotiators to bring him one.  His previous crimes appear to include writing hate letters to the families of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan along with violence of a less political nature including a string of sexual assaults and bei

Cruel Mothers

In the last few weeks we've had some very sad stories in our media.  Police shootings of mentally ill young men, children dying from drinking unprocessed milk, our government winning the right to treat asylum seekers with unprecedented cruelty....  In the midst of this are two tragic crimes. On November 23 some people out for a Sunday morning cycle heard strange noises coming from a partly covered drain beside Sydney's M7 freeway.  They investigated and found a newborn baby boy abandoned in the drain.  Doctors judged that the child had been there for 6 days.  The lucky boy is now recovering in foster care and his mother has been found and charged with attempted murder. Just a week later , two young children playing on Maroubra Beach in Sydney uncovered the remains of another infant who turned out to be a baby girl.  Sadly this child did not survive and the remains were badly decomposed.  The search for her mother is still ongoing. These stories produce a complex re