Painting Fakes

A few weeks ago I reviewed Miroslav Volf's A Public Faith .   Volf suggests that Christianity, like Judaism and Islam, is a prophetic faith, the bearer of a message from God to the world.  As such we are obliged to be neither passive, neglecting to deliver our message at all, not coercive, trying to force people to heed. I agreed with him, but found myself frustrated that his book was short on specifics.  Given his emphasis on prophetic mission, the place I turned to next for more ideas was Walter Brueggemann's The Prophetic Imagination. Brueggemann is Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, one of the Western world's leading Old Testament scholars and a renowned preacher.   The Prophetic Imagination is one of his early works, first published in 1978 and re-released in a second edition in 2001.  He describes it as "my first publication in which I more or less found my own voice as a teacher in the church". His writing is rather dense and

In the first 30 years of my involvement in church, I would have heard the term 'Universalism' a handful of times.  Most of these were passing, dismissive references from the pulpit or by an established teacher.  I never heard or read a proper explanation of what the term meant. If I had to depend on my church, nothing would have changed.  I have still never heard the concept explained in my church.  I still hear preachers refer to it dismissively from time to time and now that I know more I realise that they have very little understanding of the thing they are dismissing. The difference is that now we have the Internet.  Literate, educated Christians are no longer dependent on their local church and the books their local bookshop is prepared to stock.  The full, fascinating and challenging diversity of the world is now at our fingertips.  We can find networks and forums of people interested in all sorts of things.  Our views can be challenged and questioned from all angles.

Today as I was out walking at lunchtime I found myself thinking about one of the moral tales that formed part of our primary school reading .  It goes by various names including The Cobbler and the Rich Man, The Cobbler and the Financier or The Cobbler's Song .  This story was first made popular in Europe by Jean de la Fontaine , a seventeenth century French author, although it is much older than that and may originate on the Indian sub-continent. In this story a poor cobbler works in his shop each day, and as he works he sings loudly and cheerfully.  This singing is intensely annoying to his neighbour, a wealthy financier who lies awake all night worrying about his money and then is unable to sleep during the day because of the cobbler's noise.  Eventually the rich man hits on a plan - he gives the cobbler a purse containing 100 gold pieces. Immediately the cobbler's peace of mind is shattered and he ceases to sing.  Instead he lies awake at night worrying that som

I've been reading some books on Christian engagement in politics (with a small "p") and I thought I'd review them to give you some highlights.  A great place to start is with Miroslav Volf's  A Public Faith: How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good. Volf is a Croatian-born theologian who studied in Germany under Juergen Moltmann and is now a professor of theology at Yale Divinity School in the USA.  Among other things, he is Director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, an institute dedicated to the study of the intersection between faith and wider culture.  He is learned and erudite but also a very accessible author.  He is also open to a wide set of influences, drawing on Islamic and Jewish thinkers as well as Christian ones.  His book has a very simple, elegant construction around a set of pairs through which he drives a rather Aristotelian "golden mean". Volf conceives of Christianity, along with Islam and Judaism, as a prophetic

Whatever modest musical ability I have I owe to my Dad. It took me a while to work this out.  When I was growing up, there wasn't lot of music in the house.  Mum and Dad had a small record collection and on rare occasions they would put something on the scratchy mono turntable Dad had built himself.  We also had a piano, but no-one played it much. As I got older I realised this wasn't how it had always been.  Dad was a decent pianist and also quite a good singer.  As boy he trained as a church chorister, and our photo album included a picture of him dressed as a policeman in a production of Pirates of Penzance  where he and Mum met and fell in love. Sadly by the time I was old enough to notice, Dad had lost a lot of his hearing and this ruined his enjoyment of music.  It's just not the same when you can only hear half the notes.  His only piano playing was an occasional rendition of Fur Elise,  which he could play fairly fluently by heart despite his lack of practice.

A few years ago I wrote a series of posts  on the four fall stories in Genesis.  Ever since, I've been thinking about writing a series on the Patriarchs, the cunning tricksters who are the forefathers of the nation of Israel. Before I do I thought I'd write about Abram/Abraham's nephew and foster son Lot and the divine destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The city of Sodom provides the source for our English word "sodomy", meaning anal sex, because of the incident in this tale where the men of Sodom threaten to pack-rape their male visitors.  However, this is not a story about homosexuality, it is a story about hospitality. Our story begins in Genesis 18 with Abraham sitting at the door of his tent, pitched in a shady spot under a grove of oak trees.  It starts by telling the reader that 'the Lord appeared to Abraham'.  However, when Abraham looks up he sees three men.  Does he know that this is the Lord and his two angels?  The story is ambiguous on tha

So, apparently as of yesterday Malcolm Turnbull has been Australian Prime Minister for a full year.  As a result the media is full of stories assessing what he has achieved in that time.  Everyone is struggling.  Even the man himself nominated his greatest achievement as "having a clear economic plan for Australia".  A plan is not an achievement. It is a plan. It seems to me that all this is beside the point.  Political leaders want us to think it's all about us, but really it's all about them.  So here's the  real  list of Malcolm Turnbull's goals and achievements from the past 12 months. 1. Become Prime Minister You alienated lots of people in your stint as Opposition Leader by sticking to your principles, especially on climate change.  You need to convince people it won't happen again.  It will take lots of secret meetings and clandestine phone calls.  You will have to hope the previous occupant of the job makes some catastrophic mistakes.  Fort

Last time I was in Sydney I took a walk along the harbourside, through Barangaroo and up into Millers Point.  Thereby hangs a tale. Over the last couple of years I've been intermittently researching the redevelopment of public housing estates in NSW, looking at the strategies adopted by the state government and the evidence which supports or contradicts these strategies.  Millers Point is one of the less glorious tales I've been following. The area was one of the first in Australia to be occupied by the British, with the First Fleet setting up a flag there in 1788.  It was named for the windmills that stood on its exposed clifftops in the early to mid 1800s, grinding flour for the residents of Sydney Town.  Throughout the 1800s it was one of the more down-at-heel locations in Sydney, with the shabby docks backed by a complex of modest homes, boarding houses, doss houses and pubs inhabited by sailors, wharfies and various other workers - although there were also some pala

I should say at the outset of this post that I really enjoy the Olympics.  The tension of the contest, the sense of history being made and celebrated, the personalities large and small.  I enjoy the grace and technical skill of the gymnasts, the sheer power of the throwers, the speed and endurance of the runners and swimmers, the idea that these young people have focused single-mindedly on becoming the best they can at some arcane discipline. I enjoy the wins, of course, but what I enjoy most are those occasional moments of sporting ethics and friendship between athletes.  Like the Swiss pole vaulter helping the young Kiwi bronze medallist to clean up her face for the hundreds of photos that were about to be taken of her. Or the two women, previously strangers, who fell in their 5,000m heat and then coaxed each other through the rest of the race to finish together.  Or the tradition among decathletes of sharing the victory lap with the whole field.  These are the moments that gi

I was recently involved in a workshop where someone complained about the propensity for the wider public to support projects for homeless people that don't actually help.  The particular example she singled out was Street Swags , a charity founded in 2005 by young Brisbane woman Jean Madden.  Madden invented a weather-proof sleeping bag, and her charity raises funds to manufacture them and distribute them to rough sleepers free of charge so that they can sleep warm and dry in all weathers. Among her many other awards, Madden was named Queensland's Young Australian of the Year in 2010.  In the past month or two she has been in the news for less pleasant reasons - sacked, sued and charged in the criminal courts with fraud for stealing money from the charity she founded. This kind of scandal is certainly not the norm in the charitable world, but supporting charities like these is very popular.  The 2016 Young Australians of the Year are two Brisbane men by the name of Lucas