Painting Fakes

Speaking of nice people who give me books , a little while ago Alex gave me a copy of The Evangelical Universalist by Gregory MacDonald.  Alex himself is a passionate universalist who gets a thankyou in the book's preface and is very active on the Evangelical Universalist forum , which is well worth a look.  For myself, becoming a universalist was a fairly painless part of my gradual detachment from orthodox Evangelicalism.  At some point I realised I no longer believed that a loving God would condemn people to eternal torture, and when I realised that this viewpoint was called "universalism" I adopted the label for myself. For others the transition is much harder.  I've written previously about Rachel Held Evans' spiritual crisis , precipitated by the idea that innocent non-Christian victims of the Taliban would go straight to hell.  For someone like Evans, passionately empathetic and completely immersed in Christian fundamentalism, such a realisation can be

For some reason ever since I watched the election broadcast last night I've been thinking of this advert for NRMA Insurance a couple of years ago that featured a group of Brisbane Broncos rugby league players. Shane Webke, the owner of the damaged car, wonders if his team-mate has had a head-knock on the weekend, and if this explains his bizarre confusion about whether the problem is caused by the elements or by a rival football team. I wonder the same about our country.  We have just voted overwhelmingly, as we always seemed certain to do, for a government that promises to look firmly backwards , led by a man who in the first leaders debate said, "There is nothing wrong with this country that a change of government won't fix".  In other words, all the problems we are facing are caused by the Labor Party.  Is this evidence of some form of brain damage? As you know, I'm not a huge fan of the Labor Party although I'm even less a fan of the Liberals. 

I love it when people recommend good books to me, especially when they make it easy for me by sending them to me.  Like Tricia, who sent me a copy of this lovely book, Unapologetic: Why despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense , by Francis Spufford. As its title suggests, this is sort of a work of apologetics, but not quite.  Nor is Spufford your usual earnest Christian apologist a la Dinesh D'Souza or Alister McGrath.   Rather he is a professional writer and master of engaging prose.  You won't find yourself wading through  Unapologetic wondering how many pages there are to go.  He also largely avoids the fraught questions which dominate modern apologetics - has science disproved God?  Is the Old Testament God a monster?  Is the probability of God's existence so low as to amount to an impossibility?  Such questions are relegated to pithy, entertaining footnotes in which he refutes the standard atheist arguments in a few well-chosen w

You may think we are in the midst of an election campaign, but actually we're having two.  One is being fought across the airwaves in the various forms of national media,  The other is being fought in local communities. The first campaign is between the two leaders, Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott, with their support crews assisting and others like Christine Milne, Clive Palmer and Bob Katter trying to muscle in as best they can.  We see this campaign on our TVs every night, we read about it in the papers, we hear it on the radio.  This campaign appears to be pretty even.  Rudd is a lot smarter than Abbott and knows how to work the media, but neither leader is that popular really.  In the thrust and parry of debate very little of substance is discussed, and who "wins" is as much a matter of debate as the actual issues being discussed or avoided. Despite this contest appearing to be fairly even, all the polling information seems to be saying that the Coalition is gaining

Intrigued by a reference in Merold Westphal's Suspicion and Faith, I've just finished reading Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood is a prolific Canadian novelist, poet and essayist, critically lauded and much decorated.  This is my first encounter with her writing but I don't think it will be long before I read more. The Handmaid's Tale is a work of social satire.  Satire operates by highlighting and exaggerating absurd or problematic aspects of an idea, worldview or public personality in order to debunk it or turn it into an object of ridicule.  By far the most common application of this technique is to make us laugh, but laughter is never the main aim.  The main aim is to deflate pretensions, to open up the space for criticism, to bring the powerful or popular down a peg or two. Less commonly, because it takes much more skill, satire can aim to horrify, to make us weep.  The classic example is George Orwell's 1984, a grim comment on th

So, the first week of the election campaign has gone pretty much to plan.  We've had a debate in which both sides mouthed platitudes.  The leaders are flying frantically from place to place across the country and vying for air time in both senses of the word.  The Murdoch press has amplified its long campaign to get an Abbott government elected to the point where it is a tortured scream.  As expected, the initial enthusiasm for Kevin Rudd has worn off and the polls are suggesting a big Coalition win.  Even the recruitment of former premier Peter Beattie as Labor candidate for the Queensland marginal seat of Forde seems to have backfired. If my place is any indication, perhaps one reason the election is tilting towards the Coalition is that they are the only ones doing any campaigning.  I live in the marginal Labor seat of Moreton, and have yet to see any material from sitting member Graham Perrett.  Not even via e-mail.  I know his office has my e-mail address because he replied

Recently I acted on a whim and bought myself Peter Gabriel's first three solo albums on CD.  In his enigmatic style each of them is simply titled Peter Gabriel so they have, by default, taken on various names: either simply "1, 2 and 3" or, for those in the know, names drawn from the pictures on their covers - "Car" for the first, "Scratch" for the second and "Melt" for the third. I first heard Gabriel via Brisbane student radio 4ZZZ when I was at high school in the late 1970s.  One evening they played the entire The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway,  the last album Genesis made with Gabriel as singer.  I was hooked at first listen.  I loved the passionate, energetic music, the constant experimentation with sounds and voices and the bizarre fractured fairy tale that ran through the album.  It's still one of my favourites 35 years later. My love of this album put me in a distinct minority that didn't necessarily include all the members

I know you're all hanging out for a bit more election commentary, given there hasn't been much of it lately.  The truth is, I'm a bit gun-shy after the shock of the last Queensland Election and not quite sure if I should put my toe back in the water in case the sharks rip my foot off.  Still, here goes... The Australian Electoral Commission has been running these ads, encouraging you to get on the electoral roll. Your vote, they say, is a precious thing which you keep hidden somewhere safe and then pull out every three years and use, before putting it safely back in its box. What the ad doesn't show is the next scene in each of these little cameos in which the actors recoil, gagging and gasping as they race to open the window and dispel the stench.  If you leave things unattended for three years, they tend to rot.  We all know that the only things you hide under the floorboards are dead bodies.  This ad goes some way to explaining the stench which currentl

Thanks to a recommendation from my cousin Luke I've just finished reading a book by Merold Westphal called Suspicion and Faith.   It's the most refreshing and challenging Christian analysis of atheism I've read for some time. The hinge on which the book hangs is the idea that there are two sources of atheism, and that they require two radically different approaches from Christians.  The first he calls "evidential atheism" and is based on a sceptical approach to religion.  When Richard Dawkins asserts that the theory of evolution removes any need for a creator, he is engaging in evidential atheism.  The second is what he describes as the "atheism of suspicion".  This atheism does not arise from doubts about the evidence for belief, but from doubts about the motivation of religious believers and the function religion plays in our societies and our individual psyches. Scepticism is directed towards the elusiveness of things, while suspicion is di

Finkelstein and Silberman suggest that the glories of the Israelite kingdom of David and Solomon are greatly exaggerated.  They say the archaeological evidence points to a small territory with a tiny population of limited literacy, and that the united kingdom of Israel and Judah is unlikely to be historical. They may or may not be right.  I'm hardly qualified to judge.  However, even if the biblical accounts are scrupulously accurate, they were of little help to the Jews who wrote the books of the Apocrypha .  For them these kingdoms were so long ago, and so far from the realities of their lives, that all they provided was a memory of past greatness and a dream of a possible future. The big problem they faced in their day was this: How do you survive a dominant and often hostile empire?  For most of Israel's ancient history, including the period of the later kings and prophets and the period of the Apocrypha, the Middle East was dominated by a succession of powerful, ag

Esther is one of those books with one foot in the Old Testament and the other in the Apocrypha - others include Daniel and Ezra.  This is because the book exists in two different forms; the Hebrew version included in the Masoretic Text and a Greek version in the Septuagint that includes an extra 107 verses, plus some subtle but significant variations.  When Jerome translated it into Latin at the end of the 4th Century CE, he used the Hebrew version as his primary source, but included the extra Greek verses at the end as a kind of appendix.  When the Reformers separated out the apocryphal books from the Old Testament, the extra verses of Esther went with them.  I'm very grateful to the translators of the NRSV for putting the two parts of the Greek edition back together and providing a translation of the whole Greek text.  Chronologically, this book belongs with Tobit and Judith as a story about the period after the exile.  Its likely date of composition is similar to thei

Amid much hoo-har over the past few days, recycled Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been reported as announcing his government will scrap the carbon tax.   Of course these reports are greatly exaggerated, possibly with Rudd's tacit approval.  Rudd and his supporters will do no such thing.  When the Gillard Government introduced the carbon tax in 2011 (with operation beginning in July 2012) they did so with a two stage plan.  From July 2012 to July 2015 industries which emit carbon would have to pay a fixed price (a carbon tax) per tonne of carbon emitted - starting at $23 and climbing with inflation.  Then from July 2015 this scheme would be transformed into a market based emissions trading scheme similar to (and linked with) the one in Europe, in which permits to emit are sold through a market mechanism to the highest bidder.  What Rudd has announced is that his government will start the second phase a year earlier, in July 2014. This gives us a glimpse of the medium term futu