Painting Fakes

Next Sunday I get to do one of my rare preaching gigs.  The first for a long time and for perhaps the first time ever at St Andrews I get to choose the topic.  So I thought that all this reading of Lives of Jesus has to be good for something and I'm planning a talk on the story in Luke 4:14-30.   Jesus preaches for the first (and possibly only) time in the synagogue at Nazareth.  So I thought I'd try out my thoughts here and see if they make sense.  This is Part 1 - Part 2 is here . First, here's the passage. Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country.  He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.  When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read,and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

I used to think  a hung parliament wouldn't be such a bad idea.  After all it worked here in Queensland, where the Labor Party had to appease a rural independent for a whole term.  It didn't do them any harm.  Plenty of other countries have governments that include loose coalitions of parties cobbled together post-election and they still seem to function. However, in the case of the Gillard Government I'm starting to have second thoughts.   Since Gillard finally made her peace with the Greens and Independents in September, things seem to have gone badly in a lot of different ways. I don't necessarily mean on governance.  There have been some successes here.  The government has managed to actually get agreement on a health reform package and new workplace safety laws, while some good progress has been made on a carbon tax.  Other areas are more disappointing, especially on asylum seekers where Gillard has become so like Howard she may as well shave her head and put o

Do you, like me, despair at the quality of Australian jounalism?  I'm not talking about the sort of tabloid journalism you see on shows like 60 Minutes or newspapers like The Courier Mail.  There, at least, we have balance.  "Tenants From Hell" is balanced by "Landlords From Hell".  "Small Businesses Rip Off Customers" is balanced by"Big Businesses Rip Off Contractors".  "Government Bungling" is balanced by "Welfare Cheats".  It's awful but there's not much we can do about it.  As a wise man once said, "you can't stop the birds from flying but you don't have to let them nest in your hair".  No, what raises my blood pressure is when tabloid habits start to leak over into supposedly serious sources like the ABC, the Sydney Morning Herald or The Australian.  I know they have tight deadlines, but if we don't stop this leakage then before long our brains will be turned to porridge.  To help p

This book has been sitting on my shelf for years, brought home from some second hand book stall or other and then left to gather dust with the other classics of Australian literature which I feel I ought to read and occasionally do. Stead is not for the fainthearted.  Living in various American and European cities in between bookending her life in Australia, she wrote amidst the horrors of the Great Depression and World War 2   Her books are depressing, dense and difficult.  You have to be determined. Have I sold it to you yet?  Well, perhaps I should try a little harder.  Mediocre writing can be easy to read, great writing always requires an effort.  The reward for that effort is a rich reading experience and a different way of seeing the world.  That's what you get from A Little Tea, A Little Chat.   Not a way of viewing the world you would like to adopt, but one that, at least for me, gives me an extra point of reference. The central character in this rather strange modern

Of the books I read while I was away on holidays, the one that got my brain moving the most was Absence of Mind by Marilynne Robinson.  The chapters of this book were originally a series of lectures given as part of the wonderfully named  Dwight Harrington Terry Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy .  Her subject is what she calls "parascientific writing" - that is writings, generally by scientists, which attempt to apply scientific insights to subjects such as religion or human culture which are strictly beyond the bounds of those sciences.  Obviously uppermost on her mind are those we think of as "scientifics atheists" - the Dawkins, Dennets and EO Wilsons of this world - but she also delves further back to the writers of the late 19th and early 20th century such as Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, not to mention a whole chapter on Sigmund Freud.  One of the key aspects of this kind of thinking, she says, is that its authors see our s

So Osama bin Laden finally got found and killed , in a major Pakistani urban area just a kilometre from a military academy.  Bloody images of the room in which he was shot are broadcast around the world.  Americans dance in the streets.  Western leaders struggle to hide their glee behind serious faces.  The world is a safer place, they say, now that bin Laden is no longer in it. I'm not a fan of bin Laden.  He was the figurehead of an organisation that promotes and plans terrorist attacks.  He preached an extreme version of political Islam that oppresses everyone.  Yet I find it hard to share the glee. I'm not convinced that his death does make the world a safer place.  He's been in hiding for ten years, his activity very limited.  Al Qaeda is a network of more or less independent cells and they will continue with or without him.  They will be angry.  They have a new martyr. I'm also a little dubious about the method of his killing.  I would be interested to know

My friend Trevor recently posted a Facebook link to an article in the New York Times entitled "The Case for Hell"  by Robert Douthat.  So of course I've been thinking some more about Universalism and all that. Douthat is obviously a believer in hell.  He laments what he sees as a decline in this belief, which he attributes to a growth in pluralism ("are Christians obliged to believe that Gandhi is in hell for being a Hindu?") and an increasing outrage at suffering which comes as a result of our prosperity and relative safety.  However, he sees a problem with a faith that eliminates hell. ...to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score. In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic a

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