Painting Fakes

So, after years of discussion we are to have not merely a Royal Commission into the Catholic Church's response to sexual abuse in its ranks, but into abuse in all institutions.  Poor Nicola Roxon gets the unenviable task of designing a set of terms of reference for this behemoth. An Irish judicial inquiry into the same issue took 9 years.  We can expect a lot more on this story before it is over and a lot more people will end up with red faces. I don't envy Roxon her task.  Our society includes a lot of institutions.  The Catholic Church has been in the news a lot recently and there are many harrowing tales of abuse by priests.  Still the government is right, this is not only a Catholic problem.  Only a few years ago, claims of abuse in the Anglican church in Brisbane revealed similar horror stories, and similar lack of comprehension by senior church leaders.  Former Archbishop Peter Hollingworth lost his job as Governor-General as a result of his astonishingly insensiti

I'm reading Josephus' The Jewish War , as you do.  I love the bizarre intrigues of the Herod family and the hugely inflated numbers of people involved in everything, although the battles and the long list of forgettable names kind of lose me.  Most of all I love this story, about a Roman general called Petronius who has just become my hero of the week. In 37 AD the Roman Emperor Tiberius died and was succeeded by his adopted grandson, Gaius Caligula.  Not much good could be said of Tiberius but at least he was not completely crackers.  Caligula on the other hand was as mad as a cut snake and poor Petronius, as the chief imperial administrator in the Middle East, was now required to do whatever this madman said.  Josephus takes up the story. Gaius Caesar's accession to power so completely turned his head that he wished to be thought of and addressed as a god, stripped his country of its noblest men, and proceeded to lay sacrilegious hands on Judaea.  He ordered Petroni

It is fashionable in certain Christian circles to talk disparagingly about what are called "Jesus is my boyfriend" songs.  These are songs which express a love for Jesus without a lot of theological content.  If you swap "Jesus" for the name of your latest flame, the song will work just as well. I've been thinking about this a lot, and I've reached the conclusion that there is a lot to be said for the "Jesus is my boyfriend" song.  Certainly a lot more than could be said for the "blood and gore" song.  I suspect that our desire to explain and defend our theology every time we open our mouths shows we are not all that secure about it.  This leads us to overemphasise it and in the process neglect other important aspects of our spirituality.  So here is my defence of the "Jesus is my boyfriend" song. The origin of this type of song can be found in the Jewish and Christian tradition of reading the Song of Songs allegorically,

I found this book in the library called The Bogan Delusion by David Nichols.  I took it home purely because of the title.  I found that it was not so much a book as a rant, but very entertaining and at times even enlightening. Mr Nichols is an urban planner, teaching at the University of Melbourne.  A few years ago he moved from inner city Melbourne to outer suburban Broadmeadows, one of Melbourne's best known public housing estates and supposed Bogan Central.  With the zeal of the convert, he launches a defence of all things outer suburban against all things inner suburban.  His chief target is the notion of the "bogan", the stereotypical uncultured, hard-drinking, mullett-wearing, uneducated outer suburban Australian, for whom Broadmeadows is supposed to be the natural habitat. His idea is that there is really no such thing as a bogan.  From his description it would be hard to tell because he never really describes clearly what a bogan is, despite his visit to the

Tomorrow evening is a function celebrating the 25th anniversary of the creation of Queensland Shelter , the State's peak housing organisation.  I helped create it back in 1987, so I get to say a few words.  Here they are, or at least some of them. 1987 was famous in Queensland history as the year the Tony Fitzgerald was commissioned to conduct a 6-week inquiry into police corruption in Queensland.  Less famously, it was also International Year of Shelter for the Homeless.  A few of us formed a State committee, got some money from Brotherhood of St Laurence, did roadshows around the State on housing and homelessness issues.  At the end of 1987 we were quite happy with what we had acheived, but we realised we were still a little short of our objective - ending homelessness in Queensland - so we decided to keep going.  We reconstituted ourselves as Queensland Shelter so we could be part of the nationwide network of Shelter organisations.   Helen Wallace, who is now my business

When I was writing about John Shelby Spong's Jesus for the Non-Religious I concluded that he had misread the mood of the times, and that "the growing churches of our time are not the intellectual, post-theistic churches of the likes of Spong and his fellow progressives. They are the booming fundamentalist megachurches of the pentecostal movement, and the bastions of conservative Catholicism promoted by John Paul II and his followers." Then I read Christine Wicker's The Fall of the Evangelical Nation.  Wicker is a religious affairs reporter who spent 17 years writing for the Dallas Morning News, during which she wrote this book.  It was published in 2008, conceived in the wake of George W Bush's re-election as US President supposedly on the votes of evangelical Christians who made up 25% of the US population. These figures are Wicker's first target.  Using data published by evangelical churches themselves, she finds that the true number of active evangeli

Following on from my review of John Shelby Spong's Jesus for the Non-Religious , here's something more.  I had always thought that atheism and Christianity were incompatible belief systems but  Spong has confounded me by proclaiming himself to be both an atheist and a Christian.  He cites three arguments in support of his atheism, each of which would be worthy of our most radical 21st century atheists.  First of all,  he asserts that science has disproved theism.  The evidence of cosmology shows that there is no God above the sky.  The evidence of paleontology shows that life on earth developed gradually by natural processes.  Our understanding of science in general shows that the processes of physics, chemistry and biology are driven by natural laws which are not amenable to random divine intervention.  Richard Dawkins would certainly be pleased to read such a clear statement of his own views, although a large number of other scientists would not necessarily agree and some