Painting Fakes

On the weekend, prominent Aboriginal AFL player Adam Goodes was racially vilified by a 13 year old Collingwood supporter who referred to him as an "ape".  He took immediate action, asking security to remove her from the ground, which they did.  Collingwood president Eddie McGuire, one of Australia's most prominent media figures, was quick to visit Goodes in the dressing room and apologise on behalf of the club. Later on the young girl was very contrite, ringing Goodes to aplogise.  He was forgiving.  Thirteen-year-olds do stupid things.  She needed to be told firmly, then left alone to do better next time.  Hopefully she will. Forty-eight-year-olds do stupid things too, but they are entitled to be cut a lot less slack, especially when they are as prominent and media-savvy as Eddie McGuire.  Because only a few days later, with the vilification incident still echoing around the media, McGuire suggested on morning radio that Goodes could be used in a promotional role for

After finally catching up with Twilight , I thought I'd go the whole hog and read Bram Stoker's Dracula .  Stoker didn't exactly invent the vampire genre.  Vampires are figures of folklore and mythology, and other vampire novels preceded his, but he set the template for what was to follow.  Abraham Stoker was an Irish protestant, a member of Dublin's governing class with a promising career in in the Irish public service.  His first book sounds particularly exciting -  The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland , published in 1879.  However, by the time it was published he had already run away to join the theatre.  To be precise, he accepted the role of business manager at actor Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre in London, where for the next thirty years he acted as the calm, organised foil to Irving's charisma and persuasive powers.  His own creativity also blossomed and when he was not pandering to Irving's ego he wrote and published a number of no

I'm preaching on June 2 - next Sunday.  Here's what I think I'll say. The main passage is from Luke 8:1-21, which includes the Parable of the Sower plus a couple of stories which reinforce its central message.  Supporting passages come from Isaiah 6:1-13 and 1Peter 1:17-25. The Parable of the Sower is one of those stories of Jesus that we learnt about in Sunday School, and it's unique in being the only one of Jesus' parables which comes with its own explanation attached.  This can mean we think we understand it.  However, I wonder if we really do get it's full message, or if our familiarity blinds us.  The story starts off with the parable itself. 4 When a great crowd gathered and people from town after town came to him, he said in a parable: 5 ‘A sower went out to sow his seed; and as he sowed, some fell on the path and was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. 6 Some fell on the rock; and as it grew up, it withered for lack of moisture.

You would have thought there was not much in common between Tom Waits and The Eagles.  Waits is a jazz singer who grew into an  avant garde cult musician, makes a comfortable living and has artistic credibility to burn.  The Eagles are a country rock band who grew into a stadium rock behemoth with money to burn and comedians lining up around the block to lampoon them.  The Eagles are all lush harmonies, smooth backing and pedal steel guitar.  Waits has a gruff, raspy voice, halting piano and, as time passes, an increasing assortment of antique instruments and junkyard percussion.  I'm not sure what the various members of the Eagles think of Waits.  In 1977 Waits said he thought listening to the Eagles was like watching paint dry.  He later apologised and explained he "was just corking off and being a prick". However, things are not always what they seem.  Despite all these differences, the two actually have an amazing amount in common.  Here's some of the highligh

I've been on holiday in Tasmania for the past week.  While I was there I visited the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and it got me thinking about George Robinson and the fate of the original Tasmanians. We were taught in school that the Tasmanian Aborigines had been wiped out.  The last of them, Truganini (at least that is one variant of her name) died in Hobart in 1876.  Of course this version of history is not quite true.  There are still descendents of the first Tasmanians living now.  I'll get back to them later.  In the meantime, George Augustus Robinson. Robinson was a bricklayer and Methodist lay preacher who moved to Tasmania as a free settler in 1824.  In the 1830s he abandoned his bricklaying business and went on a mission to the remaining Aboriginal people in the eastern part of Tasmania.  His mission was prompted by the state of all-out war that had broken out between the European settlers and the original inhabitants.  For the Europeans, the Aboriginal peop

Sometime ago I had an odd dream, which stuck in my head the way very few dreams do.  I can't remember anything about the context, but I was looking for something in my Bible and noticed a whole lot of books at the end of the Old Testament that I hadn't previously seen.  They had odd names that seemed vaguely ancient and Jewish, none of which I can now remember.  I was a little surprised but mostly just fascinated, eager to read this new stuff and find out what it was all about. Recently I've been repeating this experience in real life, and thereby hangs a tale. In the bibles we have as Protestants, the last book of the Old Testament is the prophetic book of Malachi, and the last historical period addressed is the immediate post-Exilic time covered in the books of Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther.  There is then a break of over 400 years until the New Testament begins with the birth of Jesus. What was God doing in the intervening 400 years?  Well, it seems he was silent.  HA

I know I'm about seven years late, but I've finally got around to reading the first Twilight book. Not being a teenage girl, or a girl of any age, I'm a long way from the intended audience for these books.  Still, I wasn't in the target audience for the Harry Potter books either, and I read all of them pretty much as they came out.  Of course I had kids of the right age, and it was nice to share something with them.  But the early books themselves were a lot of fun, full of spells, potions, magical creatures and objects, odd characters and childish high-jinks, plus a villain dangerous enough to be scary but ultimately weak enough to be beaten by well-intentioned children.  It's a shame the later books got bloated with badly written teenage angst and clumsy attempts to darken the atmosphere, but even then there was enough fun to keep me reading.  No doubt many of the young readers who got hooked on the early books were less critical of the later ones than I was,

It's very interesting to see what's happened to Anzac Day over my lifetime. I attended a lot of Anzac Day ceremonies in my childhood.  On April 24 there would be a memorial service at school and we would all buy Anzac badges.  Then on the day itself my scout group would gather early in the morning with the other marchers at the Sunnybank shopping centre on Station Road.  Led by local war veterans, the various organisations would march - or rather stroll - down Station Road, turn left into Lister St (passing my house on the way, where Dad would wave from the verandah) and attend a short memorial service at the Municipal Hall.  Someone would play the Last Post, we would sing Lest We Forget and someone would give a short address.  I don't remember what they said, because I was always distracted by the honour boards listing the names of the local men who died in the two World Wars and whose names also graced our local streets. I stopped attending these events in my early

I don't really feel shocked when I hear about cases of sexual abuse in the church.  I feel deeply sad for the victims and angry at the perpetrators, and I feel betrayed when church leaders protect the abusers at the expense of their victims.  But I don't really feel shocked.  I've worked in child protection.  I know the statistics.  It is pretty much inevitable that somewhere in any big insitution there will be abuse going on.  When I read about it, my expectations are merely proved correct. Rolf Harris is another matter altogether.  With Rolf it's personal.  He was the first singer I ever loved.  Before I discovered pop music, he was my number one musical taste.  I had some of his records, and watched his show on TV.  His songs were also the first I ever performed in public.  I sang one of them at a scout concert and our leader (who despite the stereotypes was not the least bit abusive) was so taken with it that he got me to perform at various functions over th

In Part 1 I provided a quick summary of what Paul says about slavery.  How should we understand this message as 21st century Christians? For 21st century readers of the Bible, our immediate, visceral reaction to Paul's words on slavery is to say, "Why didn't he just come out clearly and say that slavery is wrong and slaves should be freed?  Why was he so circumspect?  Surely loving people who have been enslaved must entail giving them their freedom!"  Many devoted Christians down the ages have agreed.  The emancipation movement in 18th century England was famously led by evangelical Christians who saw the slave trade as an unmitigated evil. I suspect the answer lies in the problem of legalism.  The main danger of legalism, as identified by Jesus and Paul, is hypocrisy.  If we have obeyed the letter of the law, we see ourselves as righteous even if we actually do great harm.  This is precisely the danger in relation to slavery. Under current Australian law, i

Reading The Good Book has reminded me about the issue of slavery.  One of the more frequent complaints atheists and others make against Christianity is that the Bible, and particularly Paul, seems to support the ownership of slaves.  After all, doesn't Paul say "slaves, obey your masters"? The New Atheists say many silly and ill-informed things about Christianity, but this is not one of them.  They are raising a serious issue, so I thought it was worth a serious answer.  I'm afraid the result will be a rather long post which for the sake of the blog format I will post in two parts (Part 2 is here ).  Even then I will only just scrape the surface. Lest you think this is a dry exercise in ancient history bear in mind that human rights organisations estimate 27 million people are currently enslaved around the world and somewhere between 300 and 1,000 women are trafficked into Australia every year, mostly to work in the underground sex trade. I'll get back to