Painting Fakes

So, it seems that Scott Morrison is our new Prime Minister, less than a year out from the latest possible date from our next election.  This is hardly strange.  Each of our last four Prime Ministers has ascended to the post in exactly the same circumstances, unceremoniously booting their rival mid-term only to be booted just as unceremoniously some three years later.  The last PM not to lose their job this way, unless you count Kevin Rudd's mercifully brief second attempt at the role, was John Howard way back in 2007.  Old fashioned type that he is, he lost his job in the time-honoured manner by leading his party to a crushing election defeat and then retiring gracefully. In an immediate sense, each of these internal coups has been fuelled by dramas with opinion polls.  In each case, consistent polling over a number of months has shown that the government will lose power if it faces an election.  Mostly (especially with the switches to Rudd and Turnbul...

If you want a sympathetic, insiders introduction to Islam you could do a lot worse than Ed Husain's The House of Islam: A Global History. Husain is British-born of Bangladeshi parents, and grew up in East London.  After a youthful flirtation with Hizb ut-Tahrir and radical Islam, he returned to his parents' Sufi teachings and studied Islam in earnest, travelling to Turkey, Syria and Saudi Arabia to study under various Sufi divines and explore the origins of Islam.  In 2007 he co-founded the Quilliam Foundation , which describes itself as a counter-extremism foundation, and he also consults for the US-based Council of Foreign Relations.  In sum, he is a devout Muslim who is implacably opposed to extremism. In The House of Islam  he provides an inside look into the Islamic faith.  He aims to both enlighten Western readers as to what Islam should be about, and is about for the majority of Muslims, and to challenge the growing influence of Salafism in the Islami...

Shane Claiborne loves to quote his friend, the late singer and songwriter Rich Mullins, on the way Christians read the Bible.  Mullins used to say that it was as if we had highlighters for certain verses.  Jesus says, "you must be born again", so we must all be born again. But didn't Jesus also say, "sell all you have and give to the poor"?  Why don't we all have to do that too? Since I read that, the story of the rich young ruler keeps coming up in my reading.  It features in two of Walter Brueggemann's collected sermons, as well as in the first two of the Second Series of George MacDonald's amazing  Unspoken Sermons, where once again he is contrasted with Nicodemus. All this started me thinking.  Are these stories alternative visions of Jesus - one 'spiritual', one 'political'?  Or is there something that holds them together? The story of the rich young man is found in Matthew, Mark and Luke, with only slight variations.  He...

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 ...

For a short time, David Warner's Aussie cricketing mates called him 'The Rev', short for Reverend, after he announced his intention to moderate his combative on-field behaviour.  Over the last year that's gone out the window, and now he has been caught cheating  along with some other team-mates and banned for 12 months.  So definitely not 'the Rev' now.  Much less a prophet. Still, I can't help noticing the resemblance with Moses, the Hebrew stolen generation kid who ended up leading his people out of their Egyptian slavery. There's a lot to Moses' story but you could see it as a spiritual journey in four phases.  In the first, he is oblivious to his true identity.  Not that he is necessarily ignorant of his Hebrew heritage, but he has grown up in a high-status Egyptian household and can confidently look forward to a career in the Egyptian hierarchy and a comfortable, successful life.   In the second phase, he is awakened to the...

There is one thing that keeps me awake at night - climate change.  I don't worry about it in the abstract, I worry very concretely that my two little grandsons will inherit a world that is hostile to human habitation. I spend a day with my grandsons every week, and they are cheerful, innocent little people.  They enjoy life in the moment, trusting that the adults in their lives are caring for their needs.  But I think, perhaps we are not.  What if we are taking away the possibility for them to have peaceful, prosperous lives and storing up hardship and danger for them? It keeps me awake at night.  Which is silly.  Not because the anxiety is irrational or unjustified - the science is quite clear, my worries are absolutely within the possible future consequences of our current behaviour.  It is silly because it achieves nothing.  My tossing in my bed does not save a single gram of emitted carbon, does not take a single micro-meter off the projec...

Another day, another US massacre by a problematic person with a licensed, high-powered firearm.  We have seen so many of them, and the aftermath is so tired and predictable, that they all become a blur. Right now, in the wake of the Florida school shooting, there is a lot of hope. The survivors are young, intelligent upper middle class adults, and they are prepared to use the sudden media attention to push for change.  No politician, even Donald Trump, dare trample on their grief by dismissing them out of hand.  Perhaps they will succeed in making change.  Perhaps they won't. As Australians we tend to feel a bit smug about this.  In 1996, after the Port Arthur massacre, the Howard government introduced tough new gun controls and there have been no mass shootings since.  Our crazy school attacks are carried out with knives, and no-one dies.  Then again, there were not many mass shootings in Australia before 1996 either, once Europeans stopped massa...