Painting Fakes

Spent five days in Sydney - three days running focus groups with public housing tenants and two attending the National Affordable Housing Exchange , where they spelt my name wrong on the program.  This wasn't really a holiday but when work's this interesting it can be hard to tell the difference. Visited Eden , sleepy NSW coastal town and long term base for whaling and fishing.  Eden was the site for an amazing and maybe unique collaboration between human whalers and orcas in the capture of humpback and right whales, documented in Tom Mead's Killers of Eden .  Now people come to watch whales, and to visit the museum which celebrates their killing. Spent three days on Phillip Island , walking and enjoying beautiful scenery, failing to see any short-tailed shearwaters (except one that looked seriously ill) and joining thousands of tourists who miraculously appeared from nowhere to watch penguins walk up the beach at sunset. Drove to Adelaide via Lake Colac, the Co

I'm off travelling.  One of my favourite clients is paying me to spend a week in Sydney, then we're off for a nice little holiday in Southern NSW, Victoria and South Australia including a visit to the ageing but still healthy in-laws in Adelaide. Internet access will be limited and so you may not see another post here until the end of April.  In the meantime talk among yourselves and don't get up to any mischief while I'm away.

Reading my Weekend Australian this week has really highlighted for me the complexity and confusion generated by the current debate around the Carbon Tax.  Of course being the home of climate change denial and front page for big business interests, The Australian has no incentive to simplify and clarify the debate.  The more confused and anxious people feel, the more likely they are to either disengage or vote no.  So, although my audience is a lot smaller than theirs, let me try to close the gap.  Of course I don't know all that much about it, but perhaps that will help. There are basically three parts to the debate about the Carbon Tax.  In The Australian these are thrown together in a blender so that they  come out as a kind of thick soup.  Let me try to seperate them out. Part 1 - The Evidence for Climate Change The debate is still going on, fuelled by the likes of The Australian, about whether the climate is actually warming and if it is, whether this is caused by human a

So I was sitting in Church last Sunday, as you do, and we read the passage from John's Gospel, Chapter 4, where Jesus has a conversation with a Samaritan woman at the well outside the town of Sychar.  The sermon has completely gone from my head, as most aural communication tends to, but I was struck by part of the story. Jesus starts by asking the woman for a drink, and she is amazed that a Jewish man will ask a Samaritan woman for water - crossing racial and gender barriers was a bit of a shock back then.  Then they have a complex conversation about living water which seems to be a metaphor for eternal life, and the woman asks Jesus to give her this life.  Having got to that point, they address two issues - her sexual morality, and the difference in doctrine between Jews and Samaritans.  Here's the first part. 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” 16 He told her, “Go, call your husban

In betweeen reading all these Lives of Jesus  I managed to find time to read George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life .   I remember my first year literature tutor telling us Eliot's Middlemarch was the greatest novel ever written in English.  That's a big call but once I read it, particularly after the first 100 pages, I had to agree that she had a point. Eliot (real name Marian Evans) was a minister's daughter but as a young adult she abandoned the established church, "converting" to the ideas of German theological scholar David Freidrich Strauss, whose rationalist Life of Jesus  she translated in 1846.  By the mid 1850s when she started writing fiction she was living openly with a married man and one of the reasons she used a pseudonym was to avoid her writings being rejected because of her rather notorious personal life. Scenes of Clerical Life contains her first published works of fiction - three novellas which appeared seperately in one of John Bl

Reading and blogging on the dreams and visions of Gary Johns over the weekend made me think, not for the first time, of one of my favourite little pieces of arcane literature. When my family emigrated from England in 1967, the Australian Immigration Department gave us a little booklet called Australia: Land of Surprises.   This was specifically written for English immigrant children by a person called Carol Odell, with illustrations by Emilie Beuth, to cushion us from the culture shock we would experience in this strange new land.  The book opens with a grand promise. Australia: What does it make you think of first? Kangaroos, sheep and the wide, open spaces?  If it does, this book is going to be full of surprises; but, when you have read it, you will know what Australia is really like. It then lists 31 surprising facts about Australia.  Some of these were indeed surprising to us.  Some would also have been quite surprising to long-standing Australian residents.  Amidst the w

This weekend's edition of The Australian included an lengthy extract from Gary Johns' new book Aboriginal Self-Determination: The Whiteman's Dream .   Johns was a minister in the Keating Government and since leaving parliament has researched and written extensively on Aboriginal issues as an associate professor at the Institute of Public Policy. Johns is addressing a very real and urgent problem of public policy: why are so many Aboriginal people, particularly those in remote areas, living in such dire poverty?  However, on the strength of this extract (perhaps the whole book is better) his analysis of this problem is stale and deeply flawed. What Johns has done is work out who's to blame.  It's the leftist intellectuals (white men, in his telling of the tale) who pushed and championed the policy of Aboriginal self-determination.  The Australian loves this stuff.  At least a couple of times a year they trot out another white man to say something similar.  Not

I was thinking of calling this last article in my Lives of Jesus series the Conclusion, but that would seem to imply that I was about to give you the answer.  Sorry.  You'll have to work that one out for yourselves.  But what I'd like to do is share some thoughts that have been developing over the last three months as I've read or re-read the various books one after another. The single statement that impressed me the most was this one from Albert Nolan . We cannot deduce anything about Jesus from what we think we know about God; we must now deduce everything about God from what we know about Jesus....  To say now suddenly that Jesus is divine does not change our understanding of Jesus, it changes our understanding of divinity.... If we claim to be Christians - followers of Jesus as the Christ - then he should be at the centre of our faith.  Everything else should flow from him.  Yet so often Christianity starts somewhere else.  Most often, it starts with Paul and his

I have written before about how little our media understand the Westminster system of democracy.  Now we find that Queensland's Liberal National Party opposition doesn't get it either. The LNP is notorious for rotating its leadership.  Most of the current MPs seem to have been leader or deputy, or tried to get themselves elected to these roles, over the last few years.  Yet despite this obvious wealth of leadership experience, they have decided to draft in a leader from outside - Brisbane's popular Lord Mayor Campbell Newman.  Unfortunately for him (but probably fortunately for the rest of us) you can't be Opposition Leader in our State Parliament without being elected as a Member first.  So while Newman goes about the tedious business of getting pre-selected and then elected to the currently Labor-held seat of Ashgrove, Jeff Seeney will keep the seat warm for him - as he says "represent him in the Parliament".  I thought you were representing us, Jeff!

At last, at the end of this little series of reviews , we get to a writer evangelicals can feel safe with.  Not too safe, though! Philip Yancey is more a journalist and writer than a serious scholar, although he's no fool.  He's a popular writer of books on spiritual issues - Where is God When it Hurts about the problem of pain, What's So Amazing About Grace? about...yes, you guessed it, and so on.  His books can be found in great numbers in conservative Christian bookshops.  He has an easy, popular writing style, free of jargon, but he reads widely and deeply and brings insights from a diverse and often surprising range of sources.  The Jesus I Never Knew was published in 1995, around the same time as Marcus Borg's Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time and Robert Funk's Honest to Jesus , in the midst of the ferment caused by the work of The Jesus Seminar.  You'd hardly know it.  None of the controversy is mentioned, and a brief (out of context) quote

For the last little while I've been enjoying a couple of Flaming Lips albums - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and more particularly At War with the Mystics.   How these guys managed to slip by me for so long I'm not sure.  Perhaps the fact that there's a bit of electronica involved would have led me to read reviews and think "that doesn't sound like me".  However, their most recent album is a cover of The Dark Side of the Moon so that got my attention.  They're a clever bunch.  Complex rhythms, interesting melodies, and lyrics that make you think.  My ongoing favourite is called The Sound of Failure .  She's starting to live her life From the inside out The sound of failure calls her name She's decided to hear it out So go tell Britney and go tell Gwen She's not tryin' to go against all them 'Cause she's too scared and she can't pretend To understand where it begins or ends Or what it means to be dead It's jus

In moving, in a sense, from left to right on the theological spectrum in our adventures with the Lives of Jesus , we have finally arrived at writer who holds an essentially orthodox view of Jesus, although one which has been criticised strongly by some conservative church leaders.  Nicholas Thomas Wright  was until recently Anglican Bishop of Durham in the north of England, and is a celebrated and prolific New Testament scholar.  In this capacity he walks a fine line, on the one hand upholding many of the building blocks of Christian orthodoxy while on the other challenging conventional views of what this theology means.  Many people find him confusing.  He doesn't say what they are used to hearing, but at the same time it's impossible to brand him a "liberal".  In a sense, he sees this confusion as part of his mission.  He says: If church leaders themselves spent more time studying and teaching Jesus and the Gospels, a good many of the other things we worry about i