Painting Fakes

I have heard that while authors provide the content for their books, publishers choose the titles.  Karen Armstrong's The Case for God might be an example of this.  The title sounds like she is defending God against atheism.  In fact, the book has a good deal to say about religion, not much about atheism (although the advent of atheism is clearly part of its context) and is fairly ambivalent about the word "God". Karen Armstrong  has written widely on religious subjects and has a strong bent for comparative religion.  After a stint in a Catholic religious order as a young adult, she initially abandoned faith altogether before coming back to a more open and inclusive spirituality, embracing lessons and practices from a variety of sources in a manner reminiscent of Joseph Campbell . The Case for God   covers similar territory to Alister McGrath's   The Twilight of Atheism , but it both travels back further and delves more deeply into the religious background to th

Lois and I went to see the new movie version of Jane Eyre for my birthday.  I don't need to provide a spoiler alert, do I? What a good movie adaptation will do for a classic story - and this is a good one - is to strip away a lot of the incidental details and show the skeleton of the story in sharp relief.  What we see is a story that, while never losing its focus on Jane as its heart, is structured around two interlocking love triangles. If there is a more spiritually charged set of love triangles in English literature then I can't recall it.  What is at stake here is not mere romance, or fortune, but people's souls. Jane lives through hard times before finally arriving at Thornfield House as a governess and falling in love with her master, Edward Rochester.  Although strange, and set against the background of creaky gothic horror, the romance seems set to end happily until the inevitable romance-tale hiatus.  Edward is already married to poor mad Bertha, the s

Recently my local paper featured a story about the Lifeline shop in our local shopping centre, finally re-opening after the January flood .  They were glad to be open again, but struggling for volunteers, and hoped that the community spirit that got us through the flood would bring them more volunteers. I've got some bad news for them.  The spirit of the floods will not continue.  People behave differently in an emergency.  There's normal life, and then there's what you do in a time of crisis. To some extent, this is sad.  The willingness of Brisbane people to help complete strangers back in January was one of the best things that's happened here in years, even as the flood itself was one of the worst.  The fact that we are now back to our normal routine - neither particularly good nor particularly evil - is a bit of a let-down. On the other hand, emergency behaviour is unpredictable.  We recently read stories from London of ordinary middle class young people loot

Fellow blogger Brad posted this interesting rave about cross generational computer skills, in which he refers to the technologically illiterate baby boomers and the current generation who have such easy to use technology that it requires no knowledge.  The the most tech capable people are therefore sandwiched between these two generations. Anyway, this story popped into my head and I popped it into his comments box, but I liked it so thought I'd post it here too.  My depression/war generation Dad was one of the early users of computers in Brisbane.  He was an electrical engineer who designed giant transformers (the sort that convert electrical current, not the ones that turn into fighting robots).  In the late 1960s he used to go into the Computer Centre in the city and get them to put cards through their huge machines to work out complex equations for him. I didn't inherit any of his technological skills so I became a social worker and only started using computers w

2 Timothy 3:16-17 is one of those snippets of scripture you get taught to memorise when you're a young evangelical.  I haven't read it for a while but it formed part of our readings on Sunday morning and it struck me that I had learnt it without thinking clearly about what it means.  Now's my chance to make up for that lack.  Here's the passage. 14 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, 15 and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. 16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work . We were taught that this verse was a key indication that we should believe the Bible in its entirety.  It was often combined with a passing reference in 2 Peter 3:16

What do the English riots and social problems in remote Australian Aboriginal communities have in common?  Well, there are probably a few things but one of them is that they have brought both critics and defenders of the welfare state to the fore.   For the defenders, the riots are a protest against the welfare cuts of the new Tory Government.  They are an overflow of the stress of poverty exacerbated by the fear of lost entitlements.  For the critics, on the other hand, these generous welfare measures are part of the problem.  They encourage people to think that the world owes them a living, and enculturate them into a "something for nothing" mentality which disempowers them and disengages them from society. This same debate has been going on for years in Australia, particularly focused around the problems of Aboriginal communities.  Noel Pearson, a prominent Aboriginal leader from Cape York, has long been a critic of the welfare state, seeing it as destroying the ini

I've been listening to The Doors for the first time.  Really listening, I mean.  I've known of their music for years, had a tape or two in my collection, had them playing as I drove or read.  In fact it's hard to avoid them if you sometimes listen to the radio, or have neighbours who do.  They're one of those ubiquitous bits of our popular culture.  Yet this is the first time I've really set myself to listen properly.  Let me tell you, it's not for the fainthearted. The Doors were formed in 1966 and burst onto public consciousness in 1967 with their self-titled first album.  Four years, seven albums and untold quantities of alcohol and narcotics later, it ended with Jim Morrison dead in a Paris hotel room.  The other three band members - keyboard player Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robbie Krieger and drummmer John Densmore - tried to continue but most of the creative spark departed with Morrison, singer, chief lyricist and creator of stage mayhem. The band&