Painting Fakes

One of the most persistent images in our culture is that of the "primitive" Aborigine, wandering naked across the face of Australia, living off the produce of nature and having little or no impact on the land they lived in.  This is one of the key images behind the convenient concept of terra nullius, Australia as a land which nobody owned. I've known for a long time that this image is misleading.  From my time at Uni I learnt that Aboriginal people have a close connection with their country, that their travels are far from random and that they carefully monitored and husbanded resources.  Historian Geoffrey Blainey's book Triumph of the Nomads, first published in 1975, showed how extensive Aboriginal burning of country was and how big an impact this had on Australia's ecology. In Blainey's depiction this burning is somewhat indiscriminate, a huge impact but not necessarily purposeful in a strategic sense.  Bill Gammage's 2011 book  The Biggest Estat

As I've been reading Reza Aslan over the last couple of weeks, Larry Norman's 'The Outlaw' has been going round and round in my head.  Larry Norman is definitely not a Jesus scholar, nor a scholar of any kind.  He is a singer and songwriter, a pioneer of gospel rock and one of the more interesting characters to grace the Christian music scene.  'The Outlaw' is one of the pithiest summaries of the debate about Jesus I've ever heard, five short stanzas which say more, and are much easier to understand, than many of the thousand learned tomes written on the subject.  The song first appeared on Norman's 1972 album Only Visiting this Planet .  Here's a suitably antique recording. Some say he was an outlaw, that he roamed across the land, With a band of unschooled ruffians and few young fishermen, No one knew just where he came from, or exactly what he'd done, But they said it must be something bad that kept him on the run. Some say he wa

It's been a while since I reviewed a Life of Jesus, but I did promise to review more recent samples of the genre so here, hot off the press, is Reza Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.  I first heard of Aslan's book via a scathing review by John Dickson .  A couple of weeks later, the book itself was staring at me from the new acquisitions display in my local library, so here is my own (rather less scathing) review. Aslan was born in Iran in 1972 and fled to the US with his family in 1979 following the Iranian revolution.  After a period as an evangelical Christian in his teens he shifted back to Islam as a young adult.  He has a doctorate in religious studies and teaches creative writing and religion at various universities.  Apparently Zealot has caused quite a stir in the US and he has not just been criticised for the content of his book, but had his credentials and his character impugned on national television in a way that makes Dickson's d

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