Painting Fakes

Nothing gets Christian bloggers talking like Universalism, the idea that all people, irrespective of faith, will receive God's mercy in the end.  Recently the debate has fired up again on the back of some very clever pre-publicity by the publishers of a book by Rob Bell called Love Wins.   I haven't read the book - in fact the only people who have so far are those lucky enough to receive advance copies to review - but the debate around its teasers is already fierce. In the small and rather random group of blogs I read, Mr Hackman , Like a Child and the wonderful Richard Beck argue the universalist side, while Luke and Simone among many more hold up the more orthodox end of the debate.  I have to confess that I lean fairly strongly to the universalist side, but I'm not well-read about the subject and it doesn't dominate my thoughts much of the time, at least not consciously.  We'll get to that in a minute. The dialogue, such as it is, seems to me to be pretty

I've been thinking a lot about dictatorships lately, as we all have with the protests sweeping the Middle East.  First came the good news stories - the rapid and relatively bloodless falls of dictators in Tunisia and Egypt.  Then the not so good news - the grim determination of the Gadaffi regime in Libya to hold on no matter what the cost to the nation as a whole.  Meanwhile other conflicts await resolution - in Yemen, Bahrain, Iran and Morocco just to name a few. I don't know a whole lot about Middle Eastern politics or culture, only a few things I've read and an attentive following of Western media.  But a few things seem clear to me. First of all, our media is very focused on the figureheads of these regimes, like Mubarak and Gadaffi.  There is no doubt that these are (or were) genuinely powerful men, but no-one can rule a country on their own.  A dictatorship is not a rule by one man or woman.  Rather, it is rule by a segment of society which has the power and resour

So, this exploration of the the Lives of Jesus has finally got through the deconstructionist forests of The Jesus Seminar (via Funk and Borg ) and we are ready for something closer to a traditional understanding of who Jesus was and is.  Not too close, though.  In Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity we have a classic work of liberation theology.  I first read this book quite a few years ago, and its a delight and an inspiration to come back to it after all this time and find its message still fresh and challenging. Those unfamiliar with liberation theology should look elsewhere for a full explanation, but it emerged in the second half of the 20th century in Catholic communities in the poorer parts of the world - especially in South and Central America, but in Nolan's case South Africa.  Their major contribution to Christian theology was to assert the central importance of the social and political dimensions of Jesus' teaching. Albert Nolan is a Dominican

I've just realised that it's now over thirty years since I was first let loose on the unsuspecting public as a young Social Work student on my first placement.  I spent most of the first half of 1981 at Brisbane's Royal Childrens' Hospital, supposedly providing social work support to the families of children in the hospital.  In actual fact, I was so shy and underconfident that I spent a lot of time hiding, trying to screw up my courage to approach parents on the ward. I partly thought of this because I just spent two days helping to run a conference for alcohol and drug organisations here in Brisbane.  One of the speakers, a long-time university teacher and researcher, revealed that while she likes her students be capable of really helping people, she often passes them on the basis that at least they won't do any harm.  I think that was probably me - in fact I'm almost certain it was because one of my lecturers told me so at the time.  In hindsight, it might

While I'm on the subject of The Jesus Seminar , the various members of the Seminar are a great illustration of how it is possible to start at the same point and yet end up somewhere radically different.  Enter Marcus Borg , Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University, prominent member of The Jesus Seminar and advocate of "progressive Christianity". Borg's Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time was published in 1994, just before the Jesus Seminar publication The Five Gospels (with whose contents Borg was intimately familiar) and two years before Robert Funk's Honest to Jesus .  Borg shares with Funk the basic presuppositions that drove the work of The Jesus Seminar - that the gospels are layered works in which it is necessary to peel back later additions to arrive at the true Jesus; that the earliest layers are those involving Jesus' distinctive parables and aphorisms, while later layers include his references to himse

Enough of this frivolity!  After the bizarre speculations of Thiering and Pullman it's almost a relief to come to something as scholarly as Robert W Funk's Honest to Jesus. Robert Funk was a serious American scholar, lifelong academic and biblical historian.  His biggest claim to fame is as the driving force behind The Jesus Seminar , the work of which I have already alluded to in discussing James Robinson .  However he is also the founder and during his life the director of the Westar Institute , "a member-supported, non-profit research and educational institute founded in 1986 and dedicated to the advancement of religious literacy. Westar's twofold mission is to foster collaborative research in religious studies and to communicate the results of the scholarship of religion to a broad, non-specialist public" as it's own website says. The first and most famous (or notorious) publication of The Jesus Seminar, edited by Funk, was The Five Gospels , a critica

Of course in writing about politicians who tried to delay their own funerals , I was thinking of Australians.  In actual fact it's pretty hard for an Australian politician to delay their own demise, what with free and fair elections and all. But how could I have ignored the world's best practice examples of the art from other countries?  Of course we've recently seen Hosni Mubarak deposed, a fading old man trying to hang on for another six months against the will of the people.  But I find myself wondering - how did the army commanders, who kept him in place for the past 30 years, suddenly become the heroes of democracy by deposing him and dissolving the parliament?  The king is dead, long live...? Others seem more able to escape.  Somehow Robert Mugabe, despite being even older than Mubarak and having caused economic collapse and widespread starvation in one of the most fertile countries in Africa, is still hanging onto the reins of power in Zimbabwe and even plotting