Painting Fakes

I was a teenage cricket fan in 1977 when World Series Cricket split the cricketing world down the middle.  Kerry Packer, having recently taken over from his father as head of Channel 9, was rebuffed in his attempts to buy the broadcast rights to Australian cricket despite offering vastly more money than the ABC.  Not being one to take no for an answer, he set up his own rival cricket competition, recruiting virtually the entire Australian and West Indies teams (the two strongest in world cricket at the time) and a host of other elite players from around the world.  Rival international competitions were staged for two years, the cricket authorities filling their teams with second string players, before peace was finally made in 1979. I remember it well. So I watched Howzat! Kerry Packer's War  on Channel 9.  I was pretty underwhelmed.  For a start, it's just a poor piece of story-telling.  The cricketers, even those with central roles in the saga like Ian Chappell and To

I spent most of my time at University not studying, and besides it was thirty years ago, so it's not surprising I don't remember much.  However, one thing that has stayed with me is the idea of first and second order change. We were introduced to the idea by Mal McCouat, a long-standing social work lecturer at the University of Queensland, and a 1974 book by Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland, and Richard Fisch which went by the rather unpromising title of Change: Principles of Problem Formation and Resolution.   The idea of first and second order change is simple in the way that so many brilliant ideas are.  Most of the changes we make in our lives, or in our society, are first order changes.  These are changes made within the established order or the normal pattern of relationships.  One of Watzlawick et al's examples was in the field of illicit drug supply.  In response to concerns about drug use, authorities bring in new laws which increase the penalties for supply of

So, after months of deadlock and confusion, the Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers has provided Julia Gillard and Chris Evans with the fig-leaf they need to adopt large parts of the Coalition's policy on unauthorised boat arrivals. Of course the answer you get from an expert panel will depend very much on the question you ask.  This one was asked a number of questions, but the two pertinent ones were as follows. "....how best to prevent asylum seekers risking their lives by travelling to Australia by boat;" and "...the development of an inter-related set of proposals in support of asylum seeker issues, given Australia’s right to maintain its borders ;"  (with my italics) Their answer is that if you want to stop people coming to Australia by boat, you need to ensure that they get no benefit from doing so.  To acheive this the panel has made 22 recommendations.  The key ones for immediate implementation are: re-opening the detention centres on Nauru and

With the London Olympics winding to their close, it's hard to think anyone can have missed hearing about the woes of Aussie 100m freestyle swimmer James Magnussen and his team-mates, or missed out on seeing the Commonwealth Bank advertisement featuring his hopeful smiling face.  For those who forgot, the ad (which interestingly is now unavailable on the internet) features Magnussen out for a training run, followed by guys wearing the letters "C", "A" and "N".  They start talking him up: "Not long till you bring home gold for Australia." "Hope so," says Magnussen. "Know so!" Then a guy in a "T" joins them and starts to cast doubt on the expected gold medal.  "After all, it's not like you haven't been beaten before."  The ad ends with the "T" bloke tripping over the edge of a cliff and landing in the ocean below. Fortunately for our sometimes tenuous link with reality, Mag

I have suggested that Jesus' miracles are not so much displays of power  as teaching events coded to the worldview of first century Palestine .  If this is the case, what is Jesus teaching through them? In one sense it is not really possible to answer this question, at least not in a blog post although perhaps in a hefty tome.  Each incident has its own meaning, its own message.  Jesus spoke on many subjects and responded to many different people.  Yet much of his message is organised around the central theme of the Kingdom of God or as Matthew calls it the Kingdom of Heaven. Right from the the beginning Matthew has him saying "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near".  Jesus is not a systematic theologian, and he never defines or describes in an orderly way what he means by this term.  Instead he illustrates it in multiple parables, and enacts it in various deeds miraculous and otherwise. So here are some key things I think Jesus' deeds show us about the Kin

I'm not sure how I've managed to get through more than 250 posts on this blog without raving about Ian McDonald .  McDonald is a British science fiction writer based in Belfast in Northern Ireland, but his writing reveals a true world citizen. I've previously commented how much better current speculative fiction writers are than their counterparts in the 1960s and 1970s.  Of course there's still plenty of trash, but the sprawling space operas of Iain M Banks and the taut, adventurous cyberpunk of William Gibson are as good as any literary writing you will read.  McDonald is the equal of these and perhaps even superior to them.  He has a lot more in common with Gibson than Banks, his writing set in the near future, and his settings defined by where our current technologies might take us within our own lifetimes.  Yet where Gibson's novels are almost claustrophobic with their small casts of characters, secret rooms and secretive plots, McDonald's palette is

In my first post on Jesus' miracles I summarised my reasons for not seeing the miracles as demonstrations of power, and in the second I commented on the way the miracle stories are bound by the culture and world view of their original authors and hearers.  The starting point for this one is the theory of some New Testament scholars that among the original sources for the gospels were a "sayings gospel" and a "signs gospel".  If they existed (and their existence is merely an hypothesis, no copies exist), then the first was a collection of the sayings or teachings of Jesus, and the second of deeds attributed to him.  Within this framework, Jesus' acts are not defined by whether or not they require supernatural power, but simply by the fact that he did them. No doubt Jesus did many things - getting dressed, washing his hair, going to the toilet, ordinary everyday things of which we have no record because they were not worth recording.  The deeds we have i

I mentioned previously that I am very skeptical about the Queensland Government's supposed budget crisis .  I believe it has been greatly exaggerated by the Newman LNP Government as an overarching story to justify cuts which are essentially ideological.  Recent events in the housing portfolio, dear to my own heart, have confirmed this suspicion.  New housing minister Bruce Flegg, who has no history of involvement in housing issues, started his tenure by announcing that (shock! horror!) Queensland's public housing system is losing $2m per week, and is struggling to cope with the demand for housing from low income tenants.  He proceeded to float a number of ideas for "improving" the system, most of which involved moving tenants on from their housing in some form.  He advocated alternatives including shorter leases, compulsory transfers and asking single tenants in large housing to share if they are not willing to move. Then this week he has announced, without warning,

The management of News Ltd's flagship The Australian assures us that they don't have a political agenda, they just report the news as they see it.  If that's the case, then they see things in a slightly odd way.  Or perhaps it's better to say they see some things, but not others. For the past two Saturdays The Weekend Australian has featured pretty much identical cover stories about the refugee issue.  Yesterday's was entitled Too Poor for a Boat, Family Stuck in Asylum Void , and features the story of Burmese Chin refugee Ngun Tin Tial and her family, stuck in Kuala Lumpur after fleeing persecution in their homeland and living in legal limbo, earning a meagre living in the grey economy.  They would like to come to Australia and have got some way along the application process.  However, the wait is long, and apparently being made longer by the fact that when Australia accepts boat arrivals, these are counted towards our overall refugee and humanitatian quota of

Having had a rave about the seeming inhumanity of one of our favourite worship songs, perhaps now is as good a time as any to post my review of Rachel Held Evans' Evolving in Monkey Town.   I enjoy Evans' blog , with its combination of deep compassion and theological challenge, and wanted to read more. In many ways Evans' spiritual journey has been like my own, from fundamentalism to a more liberal view of Christianity.  However, she was more deeply immersed in fundamentalism than I was, and has taken 20 fewer years to travel the path.  Perhaps this shows that she's smarter than me - she certainly writes better! Evans grew up in Dayton, Tennessee, venue of the infamous "Scopes Monkey Trial" in 1925 in which school teacher John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching the theory of evolution in his science class, contrary to Tennessee statute.  She went to fundamentalist Christian schools before attending Bryan University, named after William Jennings Bryan, the

A while ago I had a rant at the songs showcased at last year's TWIST event, including their focus on the bleeding Jesus.  The issue came up for me again recently in my own church.  Normally when I'm playing music in church I choose what we sing, but a couple of weeks ago I was helping someone else out and they chose a song by Pat Sczebel called Jesus Thank You, the first verse of which goes: The mystery of the cross I cannot comprehend The agonies of Calvary You the perfect Holy One, crushed Your Son Who drank the bitter cup reserved for me A polite but pointed discussion ensued.  I find the third line shocking.  It portrays God the Father as a filicide, a killer of his own child, a cold and calculating psychopath who sacrifices his own child in order to satisfy some kind of cosmic scheme of his own devising. My two fellow musicans, who are both highly intelligent and educated people who have thought deeply about theological issues, justified the line theologically - to

Speaking of reading ancient texts through modern eyes, that's the subject of my second post on miracles . For the past two centuries, people in Western countries have primarily seen the world through a "scientific" mindset strongly influenced by the Enlightenment.  We see the things that take place around us as products of impersonal natural forces, and when something takes place our first reaction is to seek a natural cause.  This makes it very difficult for us to believe in miracles, because we believe that they are not a "normal" part of the cosmos.  The natural is everyday, the supernatural is extraordinary. This mindset was behind the blossoming of the "rationalist" lives of Jesus which began to be written in the 18th and 19th centures, and which are still influential today.  These sought to explain Jesus' miracles in rational, scientific terms.  The feeding of the 5,000 was explained as an event in which Jesus shamed the rich into sharing