Painting Fakes

Continuing my trawl through some of the books that have been waiting to be read for way too long....  Quite some time ago I bought a second-hand copy of Jacques Ellul's Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes,  probably at a Lifeline book sale.  I remember starting to read it, finding it dense to the point of incomprehensibility, and putting it on the shelf for later.  I'm not the only person who felt this - the book's previous owner covered the pages with underlining and illegible marginal comments for about the first third of the book, after which its pages are completely untouched. If this memory is accurate then I must have got smarter in the intervening years. His writing is not nearly as impenetrable as I remember it.  Not that it is exactly an easy read - he's a French intellectual, after all - but I found it clear, highly logical, and completely disconcerting.   Ellul was a prominent Christian intellectual in the second half of the 20th century, writin

Here's some more social isolation reading for you.  As you may know, I've spent a lot of my career working on housing and homelessness.  I could write endlessly about policy and service responses (indeed, I have in other forums) but this is not the place for that.  Instead, here are two books that tell great homelessness stories. ***  A few years ago I read John Healy's The Grass Arena , his account of life as a homeless alcoholic in London. This remarkable book was first published in 1988, made into a movie in 1991, then disappeared off the radar for years after Healy had a dispute with his publishers.  It was finally republished in 2008 by Penguin Modern Classics and it is this edition that I read. Healy was born in London in 1943, the son of poor working class Irish immigrants.  As a child he suffered abuse at the hands of his father and this set the course of his life.  He was an angry man.  As a teenager he took up boxing, feeling exhilaration when he mana

Apparently, Australians are in the grip of toilet paper panic.  Supermarkets all around Australia have had their toilet paper aisles cleaned out as shoppers load up whole shopping trollies full of jumbo packs.  Poor pensioners who can only afford to buy a few rolls at a time are getting there too late, or worrying that the aisles won't get re-stocked in time.  And it's not just in Australia.  Our friends over the ditch in New Zealand, and over the sea in the US and UK, are also wiping out toilet paper supplies. We all know it's about COVID-19 and the possibility of widespread self-quarantining, but why toilet paper?  How much toilet paper do you need to get through a 14-day quarantine period?  While some Australians are stocking up, others are laughing at them, or scratching their heads at the stupidity of it all.  I think the main reason they are confused is because they have not yet seen my World Diagram™ on the subject.  Now is your, and the world's, chance to rec

I've been writing about human rights, in the light of Australia's debate about religious freedom and the Government's proposed Religious Freedom Bill.  In the first post I had a look at the controversy over Israel Folau's infamous meme.  In the second I provide a beginners guide to the international covenants which provide the basis for human rights legislation and the question of what happens when rights collide.  In the third I provided a quick analysis of  the proposed Australian legislation.  To conclude I'd like to share some thoughts on how Christians should approach human rights. Christians often make the claim that the idea of human rights is founded in a Christian understanding of humanity.  The Centre for Public Christianity's documentary For the Love of God provides a good example .  Christians adopted the Jewish idea that humans are made in the image of God, and this was profoundly countercultural in the Roman Empire where human worth was judge

So, in Part 1 of this series I discussed the religious dimensions of the Israel Folau case, and in Part 2 I provided a summary of how international human rights treaties frame religious and other freedoms.  Now, onto the current Australian legislation.  The Commonwealth Attorney-General, Christian Porter, released the government's draft Religious Discrimination Bill at the end of August 2019, with a consultation period of a little over a month (ending October 2). The drive to legislate for religious freedom gained pace during the process of legalising same sex marriage, and is a kind of compensation to conservative religious people for losing that battle. In the wake of that process the government established a Religious Freedom Review led by former Attorney-General Phillip Ruddock.  This review found that there is no particular immediate threat to religious freedom in Australia. The Panel also heard that, as a whole, Australians generally enjoy religious freedom. Most st

In my previous post I introduced the question of religious freedom and discussed Israel Folau's case from the point of view of Christian teaching.  Now, on to the heart of the matter. Whether or not Israel Folau has accurately represented the Christian faith, he has clearly presented his own deeply held personal belief. So much so that he has refused any kind of compromise. He is not prepared to make any kind of apology, even a half-hearted one, nor to take down the post, because to do so would go against his own conscience. So it is arguable that his religious freedom is being infringed.  This is the argument he appears set to make in his potentially eye-wateringly expensive crowd-funded legal challenge. So how should we view this claim? To assess it properly we need to think about how human rights work. This is rather complex in Australian law because our human rights legislation is very piecemeal, split across various State and Commonwealth statutes that operate in various di