Painting Fakes

Yesterday's Weekend Australian contains a detailed interview with former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating and a short extract from his new book.  In it, he laments the narrowness of our current political culture, the inability of our politicians (especially his successors in the Labor Party) to tell an overarching story about Australia, where we are heading and our place in the world.  Part of the problem, he says, is that they are too focused on logic and pragmatics at the expense of vision and aesthetics. Friedrich Schiller, the German philosopher, said: "If man is ever to solve the problems of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom."    Romantic and idealistic as that view may seem to some, the thought is revelatory of the fact that the greater part of human aspiration has been informed by individual intuition and privately generated passio

So, after John Carroll's existential midrash on the life of Jesus, we return to a more typical type of contemporary midrash , the historical reconstruction.  Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts by John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L Reed represents a detailed forensic examination of historical evidence in the tradition of the Jesus Seminar , of which Crossan was co-chair for a decade.  Crossan is perhaps the more famous of this pair of authors, known for his New Testament scholarship and his reconstructions of Jesus' life and the first century church.  Reed, while lower profile, appears to be just as distinguished in academic terms and specialises in Palestinian archaeology. Within the dual focus of their sub-title, the division of labour seems clear - Reed deals with stones, Crossan with texts. It is the combination of the two which provides the power and fascination of this book.  The archaeology of first century Palestine can't tell us much in par

So, a few weeks ago I wrote a letter to Julia Gillard , with copies to Chris Bowen and my local member Graham Perrett, outlining the reasons they should not only abandon overseas processing of boat arrivals but the whole mandatory detention system.  I'm still waiting for the reply, aside from a brief acknowledgement from a member of Perrett's staff thanking me for saying what I think.  But blow me down if they haven't gone and done something quite like what I suggested .  All arrivals will be processed in Australia, with those deemed likely to be granted refugee status given bridging visas and allowed to live in the community after basic health and security checks.  At last, a move in a more humane direction! It would be nice to think they listened to me and the thousands of other people advocating a more humane solution.  Sadly, it seems that it's just a stuff up.  The media is even talking about it as the "failure of migration policy".  Both Liberal and La

To keep the Australian theme going here is another Australian Life of Jesus , The Existential Jesus by John Carroll.  However, this is where the resemblance to  John Dickson ends .   Carroll is a professor of sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne and is not an active church member or a biblical scholar.  Instead, he approaches the story of Jesus through a secular reading group he convenes at the University, which has twice read the Gospel of Mark in its entirety.  He has found the story profoundly affecting and life changing, and this book is the result. Nor is Carroll greatly interested in the Quest for the Historical Jesus, and is scornful of both the idea of Jesus as eschatologocal prophet , and of the Jesus Seminar with their colour-coded sayings.  Not that he doesn't make use of historical research - he leans particularly heavily on Catholic scholar Raymond E Brown - but his intention is quite different from theirs.  This is what he says. The Christian churches h

As a teenager I was fascinated by the story of King David.   It was a part of the Bible I read over and over again.   Looking back on it, I think it’s because David is the most complete and the most human character in the Bible, even including Jesus.   D espite his flaws and his repeated failures he keeps trying to do right and enjoys tremendous success.   Plus, there’s lots of action, plenty of blood and guts and a fair amount of sex. At one point I even wrote an ancient history assignment about King David’s role in Israelite history.   However, I lost marks because of my naïve acceptance of the Biblical accounts as accurate history, my failure to evaluate them as sources. To be fair to my teenage self, back in the 1970s most historians had a fairly generous view of the historicity of Samuel and 1 Kings.   Not that I knew anything about it at age 16, but most critics regarded elements of these stories as reaching back to two narratives written close to the time of David himself –

It's always good to step outside your normal environment and be exposed to something new.  That's how you learn.  So I let myself be persuaded to go to last night's TWIST (The Word in Song Together) conference.  This is part of a series of events organised by Emu Music , an Australian organisation best known for recording and publishing new worship music but which also runs frequent training events for church music leaders.  That's me, so off I went. The event went for about two hours, split pretty evenly between singing and listening to the featured speaker, Bob Kauflin, a songwriter and worship leader from Sovereign Grace Ministries in the USA.  As you'd expect from a room full of 500 musicians the singing was good, led by a polished (and loud!) pop-rock ensemble.  The songs, and the talk, certainly made me think, but I probably wasn't thinking what the organisers wanted me to think.  I rarely do. The talk was pretty simple, although I may have lost the

Christians have a recurring problem over suffering.  Apart from the fact that they actually suffer, which is a problem everyone has, the Christian-specific problem is this: Christians traditionally believe in three things. God is all-powerful, both knowing and being in control of everything that happens in the universe. God is perfectly loving, desiring nothing but good for his/her children and creation. Humans have free will and are able to decide the direction of their own lives, including being able to reject God and to make mistakes. The problem is that these things are logically incompatible, and nothing brings this incompatibility into focus more than suffering.  If God is both loving and all-powerful, why does he allow suffering in the world?  There are two common answers.  One is that the suffering is a result of our misuse of our freewill.  This, however, calls into question either God's power (could God not have designed things so that our freewill need not lead to

My atheist friend and occasional fellow blogger Roo told me I should read Michael Shermer's The Believing Brain   as part of my series on atheism.  While I wait for the lovely people in the Brisbane City Council library service to buy it and lend it to me (yes I am a cheapskate, and besides, I pay my rates!) I've been whetting my appetite with one of his earlier books, Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition and other confusions of our time. It's a little unfair in some ways to include Shermer in a series on atheism given that he makes it clear in this book that he is an agnostic.  Nonetheless, it's worth looking at the light he sheds on various belief systems and why they come into being.  Shermer is something of a minor celebrity in the US, a regular guest on TV chat shows where he appears as the token skeptic in episodes about the various "weird things" he discusses in this book.  He has degrees in psychology and the history of s

Yesterdays Weekend Australian Magazine includes  this moving extract from the soon-to-be-published memoirs of former High Court Judge Michael Kirby.  It tells the story of his lifelong partnership with Johan van Vloten - how they met, the early days of their relationship, his ongoing delight at finding love when he thought he was destined for a life of loneliness. If Johan had been a woman there would be nothing remarkable in this tale, and it certainly wouldn't be the pre-publication extract.  If I remember rightly, none of the extracts from John Howard's book talked about his lifelong love for Janette.  Yet there is an undercurrent of pain in Kirby's telling.  In the 1970s (the pair met in 1969) it was illegal to be gay, and Kirby was a high profile lawyer and later a judge and the public face of law reform.  Their relationship stayed more or less secret until the late 1990s when social attitudes finally allowed them to come into the open.  Of course colleagues knew o

Talk about turning a negative into a positive.  Ray Smith , the Labor candidate to become Brisbane's Lord Mayor next year, just had a flyer delivered to my letter box.  First of all he tells us this. Everywhere I go people are telling me they're fed up with costly toll tunnels that nobody uses.  Council isn't solving our traffic problems.  Despite all the wasted money, traffic is worse than ever. Fair enough, but later on he tells us why we should vote for him. My background is in business - I'm not a career politician.  I haven't sat around in Council for over 20 years like my opponent, instead 20 years ago I started a small business working for myself.  Today that business employs over 150 highly skilled locals. In other words, unlike Graham Quirk, the long-standing Councillor who recently inherited the Lord Mayor's job when Campbell Newman stepped down to make his tilt at becoming president of Queensland , Ray Smith has no relevant experience.  Whil

I was generally a bit lukewarm about John Dickson's A Spectator's Guide to Jesus.   However, he did say something at got my attention. "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" is one of those biblical phrases that has made its way into our wider culture.  This means that it is often taken out of its context, even by Christians.  Whenever I have heard a sermon or a discussion on this verse, it is taken to mean something like, "what's the point of riches and power if you are going to end up in hell?  It's better to believe in Jesus even if that means giving up these things."  There is of course a certain amount of truth in this but there is much more to the story than that. Here is the full passage it comes from, Mark 8:27-38 taken from the New International Version rather than the King James that you will most often hear quoted or misquoted. 27 Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages ar

After the hilarious foolishness of Stephan Huller  it's kind of calming to read a book about Jesus as sensible as John Dickson's A Spectator's Guide to Jesus: and introduction to the man from Nazareth. John Dickson  is a theologian and ancient historian, co-director of the Centre for Public Christianity in Sydney, and has a shadow life as a gospel singer.  He is representative of the sort of moderate evangelicalism that permeates the Anglican church and many other mainstream protestant denominations here in Australia.  It would be hard to imagine a more orthodox commentator on the life of Jesus. The first thing that stands out about Dickson, more than any other writer I have read on the Life of Jesus , is his transparency about his sources.  Indeed there is a 100-page companion volume to A Spectator's Guide entitled The Christ Files which provides a handy summary of the various ancient sources - both Christian and non-Christian - for the life of Jesus.  He is also