Painting Fakes

So, after eight years Barack Obama's presidency is over. Nothing on my Facebook feed is as polarised as the reaction to Obama's departure and the man who will replace him.  Some are mourning, others are celebrating.  Some are praising his graciousness and his lovely family, and dreaming of his wife Michelle launching her own candidacy in 2020.  Others are celebrating wildly, rejoicing that his destructive reign is finally over.  And that's just my Australian friends. I'm certainly not a fan of Donald Trump (I'll get to him in a moment) but I find it hard to join in the full-throated weeping for Obama. To my mind, Obama's presidency is summed up in his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2009.  At the time he had been President for less than a year.  The Nobel Prize Committee cited  'his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples', his 'vision of and work for a world without nuclear ...

It being summer I've been watching copious amounts of cricket and avoiding anything too intellectual or work-related.  As an additional aid to this vegetative process, I've been reading some of the cricket memoirs that have been released over the past few months.  There is Michael Clarke's My Story,  Chris Rogers' Bucking the Trend  and Mitchell Johnson's Resilient. I find the thought processes of elite athletes fascinating.  To succeed at their sport, they have to be really focused - not just when they are performing at the elite level, but on the way up.  They have to make sacrifices, as do those around them - their parents, siblings, partners and children.  They have to do this amidst a huge amount of uncertainty.  They might not make the grade.  An injury or an illness can end their career at a single stroke.  Their best may not be quite good enough. These three men travelled quite different pathways to the top.   Michael Cl...

In  Irresistible Revolution  Shane Claiborne presents himself as an 'ordinary radical', suggesting that he is no-one special and that the way he lives and advocates is open to all.  Even though he presents his case convincingly, I am not so sure.  Certainly Claiborne is an ordinary human being - he eats, he drinks, he gets tired, he shits out of the same hole as the rest of us.  But the direction he has taken in his life is quite extraordinary.  I read about his life and I think "I couldn't do that". I feel the same when I experience this close to home.  I have some friends who have spent most of the past two decades living in various slums in India.  Their children have grown up living in one-room dwellings without sanitation or running water, surrounded by poverty and hardship.  Of course many people have to live this way but they didn't, they chose it.  I know for sure that they are ordinary people, a lot like me in many ways, and t...

If you've been following this little series on Christian politics (previous posts here , here and here ), you will see that I have been moving from optimism to critical engagement, from "cool" analysis to passionate engagement and from theory to practice.  I'm not suggesting that one is superior to the other.  I'm simply trying to paint a reasonably rounded picture.  You might also notice that all the authors are from the US - this was unintentional but at least it shows that there is more to Christian politics in the US than the Religious Right. By way of completing the journey into practice and passionate engagement, my final exhibit is Shane Claiborne's The Irresistible Revolution: Living As An Ordinary Radical.   You won't find any heavy theorising here. Claiborne is in great demand around the English-speaking world as a speaker, and has written a number of books.  This is his first, the story of his life so far, published in 2006 and re-issue...

So, to continue this little series on Christian social and political engagement.   Miroslav Volf tells us that Christianity is a prophetic faith, and that our prophetic calling requires us to engage with our wider society in a manner which is neither passive not coercive.   Walter Brueggemann suggests that a prophetic ministry should open up possibilities beyond the dominant consciousness, allowing us to mourn the injustices of our society and dream of something better. Neither of them tells us how we should do this.  One way to start to think about this more practically is via Walter Wink's The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium , first published in 1999.  This is a short, accessible rendering of material from a trilogy of books Wink published between 1984 and 1992. Wink suggests that institutions, like individuals, have a spiritual as well as a physical reality.  This reality is not inherently good or evil.  Our social institutions ofte...