Painting Fakes

Our newly re-elected Commonwealth Government has introduced new legislation to protect religious freedom.  It is not really clear that we need it (in what ways is religious practice currently restricted?) but there are a number of stalking horses in the debate, like whether Christian schools are free to sack gay teachers, whether preachers can say strong anti-Islamic or anti-gay things in public, and whether bakers can be forced to bake gay wedding cakes.  Bigger and noisier than all of these is the Israel Folau affair. All this kind of turns up the heat on religious freedom without necessarily providing much light, so I thought I'd use the Folau business as a way in to talking about the wider question of religious freedom in Australia and how we might approach it sensibly. First of all, by way of clearing the decks, I'd like to address the question of the relationship between Israel's pronouncement and Christianity. For those living under a rock (or perhaps, living i

Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has flooded our consciousness over the past few months.  Snippets of his talks keep popping up on my social media.  His book tour attracted national interest.  People on the right love him, those on the left hate him. None of this is accidental.  He has been carefully curating his public profile for years, posting prolifically on his Youtube channel, speaking publicly and making himself available to media outlets of all kinds.  He has a devoted following and earns a decent income from Patreon via donations from viewers of his long and complex videos.   His reputation is as someone who thinks deeply about the meaning of life and the significance of ancient mythology for the problem of Being.  However, he has been pushed into the mainstream in the guise of a champion of the Right courtesy of his embroiling himself in a rather strange and silly war in his university over the use of pronouns.  In the process he has become a champion of that mos

Thanks to my friend Tricia, I've been reading a great book by Parker J Palmer called Healing the Heart of Democracy: The courage to create a politics worthy of the human spirit.   Although this is a book about the US, it has a lot to say to Australians and others in democratic societies.  He writes simply and elegantly so that you think what he is saying must be obvious, but he covers territory that is not often discussed in 'political' books and debates. Palmer is an American Quaker activist, now in his late 70s.  This book, published in 2011, arose out of what he describes as a 'season of heartbreak - personal and political heartbreak - that soon descended into a dark night of the soul'.  This arose partly out of his awareness of his personal mortality on turning 65, and partly from feeling increasingly out of step with wider American culture. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had deepened America's appreciation of democracy and  activated d

A few years ago my daughter and I developed an addiction to the American crime drama Bones.  The story centres around a group of forensic scientists, the most brilliant of whom is forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.  This team of impossibly good looking and brilliant people work in a shiny laboratory at the Smithsonian Institution and solve grisly murders rapidly on the basis of the tiniest scraps of evidence.  In one episode they solve a murder in which the only evidence is a single finger-bone of the victim. If we switched the TV on a bit early, we would get to see the end of the previous show, which for a long time was one of those police docu-dramas where the cameras follow a group of real police officers as they go about their daily business.  The contrast could not have been more stark.  Real police work turns out to be amazingly pedestrian.  The officers pull someone over for a faulty tail-light and find drugs in the glove-box.  A serious offender is caught because som

Speaking of hope and despair , I've just finished reading a horrible and wonderful book by Matt Taibbi called The Divide: American Justice in the Age of the Wealth Gap. Taibbi is an American journalist who has written for publications such as the New York Times, Rolling Stone and many more.  He is no stranger to controversy and even seems to court it, once writing an article called "The 52 Funniest Things About the Upcoming Death of the Pope", which led to the sacking of the editor who approved it for publication. The Divide  was published in 2014 after years of research, and it shows he is far from being a cheap publicity-seeker.  It is a penetrating analysis of the way the 21st century American justice system works. The book opens with a scene in a New York courtroom in 2013.  A group of bank executives and employees is paraded in chains, charged with fraud.  Their crime?  They signed up mortgages based on minimal and often false documentation, then on-sold these

Today as I was out walking at lunchtime I found myself thinking about one of the moral tales that formed part of our primary school reading .  It goes by various names including The Cobbler and the Rich Man, The Cobbler and the Financier or The Cobbler's Song .  This story was first made popular in Europe by Jean de la Fontaine , a seventeenth century French author, although it is much older than that and may originate on the Indian sub-continent. In this story a poor cobbler works in his shop each day, and as he works he sings loudly and cheerfully.  This singing is intensely annoying to his neighbour, a wealthy financier who lies awake all night worrying about his money and then is unable to sleep during the day because of the cobbler's noise.  Eventually the rich man hits on a plan - he gives the cobbler a purse containing 100 gold pieces. Immediately the cobbler's peace of mind is shattered and he ceases to sing.  Instead he lies awake at night worrying that som

I've been reading some books on Christian engagement in politics (with a small "p") and I thought I'd review them to give you some highlights.  A great place to start is with Miroslav Volf's  A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good. Volf is a Croatian-born theologian who studied in Germany under Juergen Moltmann and is now a professor of theology at Yale Divinity School in the USA.  Among other things, he is Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, an institute dedicated to the study of the intersection between faith and wider culture.  He is learned and erudite but also a very accessible author.  He is also open to a wide set of influences, drawing on Islamic and Jewish thinkers as well as Christian ones.  His book has a very simple, elegant construction around a set of pairs through which he drives a rather Aristotelian "golden mean". Volf conceives of Christianity, along with Islam and Judaism, as a prophetic

Last time I was in Sydney I took a walk along the harbourside, through Barangaroo and up into Millers Point.  Thereby hangs a tale. Over the last couple of years I've been intermittently researching the redevelopment of public housing estates in NSW, looking at the strategies adopted by the state government and the evidence which supports or contradicts these strategies.  Millers Point is one of the less glorious tales I've been following. The area was one of the first in Australia to be occupied by the British, with the First Fleet setting up a flag there in 1788.  It was named for the windmills that stood on its exposed clifftops in the early to mid 1800s, grinding flour for the residents of Sydney Town.  Throughout the 1800s it was one of the more down-at-heel locations in Sydney, with the shabby docks backed by a complex of modest homes, boarding houses, doss houses and pubs inhabited by sailors, wharfies and various other workers - although there were also some pala

I was recently involved in a workshop where someone complained about the propensity for the wider public to support projects for homeless people that don't actually help.  The particular example she singled out was Street Swags , a charity founded in 2005 by young Brisbane woman Jean Madden.  Madden invented a weather-proof sleeping bag, and her charity raises funds to manufacture them and distribute them to rough sleepers free of charge so that they can sleep warm and dry in all weathers. Among her many other awards, Madden was named Queensland's Young Australian of the Year in 2010.  In the past month or two she has been in the news for less pleasant reasons - sacked, sued and charged in the criminal courts with fraud for stealing money from the charity she founded. This kind of scandal is certainly not the norm in the charitable world, but supporting charities like these is very popular.  The 2016 Young Australians of the Year are two Brisbane men by the name of Lucas