Painting Fakes

It's hard to avoid Dan Sultan these days.  Ever since he appeared in the ridiculously funny Bran Nue Dae he's been constantly in the media, recieving music awards, playing at celebrity concerts, promoting worthy causes.  He seems a level headed young man, comfortable with his Aboriginal heritage and not afraid to speak up for himself.  He's also no mean singer, belting out an infectious brand of soul-inflected pop music. However, I have to admit I find myself a lot more fascinated by his long-time collaborator Scott Wilson.  When I first saw Sultan live on stage - a vibrant set at Byron Bay Bluesfest - it was obvious Wilson was the key to the band, playing lead guitar, counting everyone in,  holding the whole thing together while Sultan did his charismatic performing thing. So I've been digging.  On Sultan's most recent album, Get Out While You Can,   released in late 2009, Wilson plays a large number of different guitars and is credited as co-producer.  H

Over the past few days I've found myself wondering what the socialist German playwright and poet Berthold Brecht would have made of my short post on Plutarch and his biography of Mark Antony.    The trouble with using someone like Plutarch as your source of historical information is that as a biographer, he is only interested in the individual.  You learn plenty about Mark Antony but not much about those around him, and virtually nothing about those under his command or under his rule.  This can make him seem like a romantic figure, an actor in a glorious tragedy. You do learn enough, though, to know that things were not so glorious for others.  When he stuffed up the campaign in Parthia thousands of his soldiers died, and the others had to resort to eating bark and leather to survive on their long retreat through the desert.  Thousands more died in his ill-fated naval battle against Octavius, while he and Cleopatra high-tailed it back to Egypt with their gold on board.  No w

Reading ancient authors can be disconcerting.  It's hard to be certain if you're inhabiting the same mental universe as they are.  How similar are we to our forebears of two millennia ago, and how much have shifts in time and culture made fundamental changes to our outlook?  For instance, my recent reading of some of Plutarch's Lives . Plutarch was a Greek author and philosopher who wrote at the end of the first and beginning of the second century CE.  He was a philosopher, trained at the Academy in Athens, and also a priest of Delphi, the famous shrine of Apollo from which Greek and Roman leaders sought oracles before they set out on important ventures.  However, he is best known for his "Lives", a series of short biographies of prominent Greek and Roman leaders from various eras.  He produced these in pairs - one Greek, one Roman - intended to illustrate different moral and political lessons and to compare and contrast Greek and Roman civilisation.  The Peng

So after a weekend of wild weather across southern Queensland it seems that Brisbane is about to be flooded again .  Fortunately for us the event is being described as a "minor flood" with levels 2 metres below what they reached in 2011, so we should be high and dry, unless further rain intervenes.  Not so our friends in Maryborough and Bundaberg, a bit further up the coast, who are facing a lot more water than they did in 2011.  Thinking of you all up there. Ironically, although so far we have suffered no damage worth talking about in the storms that arrived this week, we did suffer a number of technological failures including of all things a blocked water main which meant our running water was reduced to a trickle.  I didn't mention the irony to the poor Queensland Urban Utilities guy who had to come out and fix it in the pouring rain on Sunday afternoon.  That would just have been annoying.  I'm hoping he got double time plus an extra wet weather allowance.

So, I get to preach again after a long break, and my subject this Sunday is Psalm 116.  Here's what I think I'm going to say, or something like it. The Book of Psalms is a song book, an anthology of works by different authors written at different times in Israel's history.  It probably came together in its current form in the post-exilic period, but many of the songs it contains are pre-exilic, with a lot attributed to King David.  No musical notation has survived (it's possible that none ever existed) and we have no way of knowing how the songs were sung, but what appear to be musical instructions appear in some of the psalms and the title of the book itself comes from the Greek word for songs accompanied by stringed instruments. In principle, this collection is similar to the collections we use today for church worship - The Australian Hymn Book, say, or the various collections of Scripture in Song or The Source.   Like these contemporary collections, it conta

Reading and thinking about Tom Waits and the art of being someone else made me think of Helen Demidenko. Demidenko burst onto the Australian literary scene at the age of 22 in 1994 with her novel The Hand That Signed The Paper.  Prior to its publication the novel won the Australian/Vogel award for a manuscript by a young author.  After publication in 1995 it won the Miles Franklin, Australia's most prestigious literary gong. The novel, purporting to be drawn from stories told to the author by her Ukrainian refugee family, dealt with the cycle of violence between Ukrainians and Jews  It blamed Jews for the Ukrainian famine of the late 1930s (for which, incidentally, the Russian Communist Party was actually responsible) and subsequent Ukrainian involvement in the holocaust was portrayed as a consequence of this prior crime. The book's reception at the hands of Australia's literary establishment can't have been hindered by its charismatic author.  A ta

I've been a fan of Tom Waits for a long time.  His music is so distinctive, his clever jazz-influenced sound cutting across the blues and folk of his contemporaries, his worn voice telling stories of bad luck, bad whisky and life on the edge of society.  The apparent shambles of his music and his person hides a rare sophistication and attention to detail which has produced a unique body of work over almost 40 creative years. So one of my holiday reads this year was Barney Hoskyns' Low Side of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits.   I wanted to know, what makes Waits tick?  How does he come by the slanted, left-field view of the world which makes his songs so distinctive? Unfortunately - or perhaps fortunately, as we will see -  this is just what Waits himself does not want me or anyone else, especially a journalist like Barney Hoskyns, to know.    Waits not only refused to speak to Hoskyns, he also discouraged his friends from doing so.  This left the author relying on ex-friends

We often hear talk about "the magic of Christmas".  Usually it has something to do with elves and flying reindeer and Santa Claus breaking into your house through the ceiling vent.  However, we shouldn't forget that the original Christmas story (you know, the one with Jesus in it) also features magicians.  Here they are, in the NIV translation of Matthew 2. After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, “Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star when it rose and have come to worship him.” Herod consults with his scholars and suggests they try Bethlehem, then asks them to report back to him after they have found the child. After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen when it rose went ahead of them until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were overjoyed. On coming to the house, they sa

And now for something completely different...Soren Kierkegaard was an early/mid 19th century Danish theologian, famous as one of the founding figures of what came to be called existentialism before this philosophical school became associated with atheism in the 20th century.  Kierkegaard trained in theology and toyed with the idea of becoming a pastor in the State Church of Denmark, finally deciding not to follow through.  He also toyed with marriage before breaking off the engagement.  In the end he lived most of his life on the proceeds of an inheritance from his father, acting as a theological and intellectual gadfly, at odds with his church and his society.  Over his life he published a number of theological works  Many were published under fanciful pseudonyms that seemed designed to suggest he was not fully committed to their content, that they were coats he tried on to see how they looked.  The Sickness unto Death is published under the name Anti-Climacus, "edited by So

We woke up this morning to read about yet another mass shooting in the USA.  In an all too familiar story, a young man with no criminal history has gone on a shooting rampage in a school in Connecticut, killing 26 people including 20 children before turning the the military-style rifle on himself. It's a tragedy for the children and families involved, including the family of the killer who started his rampage by killing his mother and ended it with his own death.  It should also be a political scandal of the first order.  How did an ordinary, and obviously disturbed, young man get his hands on a piece of powerful military hardware?  Why, after so many such killings, are gun laws still unchanged and all these weapons still lying around in suburban homes? It's not often I praise former Australian Prime Minister John Howard, but my American readers should take note of how he responded in a similar situation. On 28 April 1996 a young man named Martin Bryant went on a sho

For over 50 years, up until his death in 2011, John Stott was a leader of the worldwide Evangelical movement.  He was a key author of the Lausanne Covenant on World Evangelisation in 1974 (he was chair of the drafting committee) and central to the subsequent spin-offs and supplementary statements. Stott was an ever-present eminence in my youth, an evangelical authority who was assumed to be right until he could be positively proven to be wrong.  You would be hard put to find such proof - his writings are careful and considered, marshalling evidence before laying out a modest, logical conclusion.  His sermons - to which we listened on cassette tapes - were masterpieces of the art of condensing complex subject matter into four alliterative points for easy recall.  He was not so much an original theologian as a gifted teacher, able to explain complex concepts in simple lay terms. He was a good role model for young evangelicals.  He didn't despise learning but nor did he flaunt it.

Most of you will probably be aware that the United Nations Doha Climate Change Conference is lumbering to a close .  Delegates sit in air-conditioned comfort in a country which is perhaps a small foretaste of our future world and struggle to make decisions that are in some way meaningful. As a result, we have been getting updates on the latest findings of climate science, and the results are not pretty.  Data on increases in emissions, rises in sea levels and trends in average global temperatures are all worse than expected.  Melting permafrost adds an element to warming that most models didn't include because of previously inconclusive evidence.  Climate scientists are pessimistic about our ability to acheive the objective of keeping warming to 2 degrees celsius by 2100, and 4 degrees is being discussed.  A recent World Bank report suggests the human consequences of such a rise would be catastrophic.  Here's a bit of what they say. Even with the current mitigation