The Black Square

Fashion convergence: don't get pinched

2009-02-11T22:18:00.014+09:00

Fashion is always self-referential. And in these self-proclaimed post-times, it's self-consciously self-referential. It just wouldn't be authentic otherwise. Every time in fashion references some other time. It used to be called retro. Now it's taken for granted.

For a long time it was retro to reference the 60s. Then, for not quite as long, the 70s became retro. By the time the 80s rolled around again, one didn't talk about retro. We weren't sure where we were. But we weren't unsure for long. These 80s were only half as long as the first ones. No sooner had we filled our wardrobes with oversized colour, we'd moved on.

Looking around, the 90s are definietly here. The sizes are still over, but the colour is gone, replaced by black, black, navy, white, and black. Things are serious, but not well-cut. Aviator specs, wire and plastic, are favoured. And jewelry.

If the decades are becoming swiftly shorter, how long will the 90s last? It would probably be more precisely counted in months than years. Then it will be the noughties again, and the original noughties will have only just come to a close. If these reworked noughties are shorter still, then sometime around 2014, like two lines crossing on a graph, it will be both the first 2014 and the second 2014 at the same time.

What weirdness will this confluence of real-time and retro-time wreak? Prediction: there will be two utterly different but indistinguishable groups living side by side. One group, unaware of the second 2014, will continue obliviously dressing in the fashion of real-2014. The other group, the fashion conscious, will self-consciously self-referentially wear retro-2014.

These styles will, of course, be entirely indistinguishable. The latter group will be referencing the former group, after all. But the fashionistas will know, beyond doubt, who is is and who is out, and they will despise those without the sense to self-reference. In five years, you will either know who to despise, or you will be despised.

The really interesting thing will be what happens after this. Will 2015 self-reference 2016? Will fashion be ahead of itself for the first time since the 1930s? Will designers be forced to come up with something new? Once the lines have crossed, the graph will be up-side-down. Will fashion, too, be stood on its head?

Photo by Hel Looks

Now at the Unichurch blog

2009-02-05T19:13:00.009+09:00

Just thought I'd let you know that I'm now also contributing regularly over at the Unichurch blog. The blog is being updated each day by the Unichurch staff, so there is there is much more new content there than there is here. Some of the stuff is be relevant only to people at Unichurch, but most of it is of wider interest. My contribution will also be far more regular on the Unichurch blog than the patchy effort I barely manage to maintain here. Today I began a series on Jared Diamond's brilliant athropological history, Guns, Germs and Steel. Would be great to hear your thoughts.

Requiem

2009-02-03T13:50:00.005+09:00

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

— John Updike

Saw this in the NYT a few days ago, a slightly tongue-in-cheek memorial to a great writer.

The Decemberists live in Boston

2009-01-31T20:51:00.002+09:00

Every song. Free, legit, quality recording. Amazing. Here.

Looking forward to the mess

2009-01-24T19:36:00.002+09:00

Being a Christian is like being a sentry, posted on duty in an army encampment, wrote John Newton (hymn-writer of "Amazing Grace" fame) in a letter to a friend. It may be hot or cold, it may be exciting or boring, you may get hungry, mosquito-bitten, or even fired upon. It's definitely not where you want to be. Everyone else in the camp is warm and fed and playing cards down in the mess hall. But you've been posted on the wall, and you have a duty to your Commanding Officer to stay there until the job is done.

"To live is Christ," wrote Paul in his letter to the Philippian Christians, "and to die is gain." Paul knew that it's far better to be in the mess with the CO than out on the wall. Why would you want to stay out any longer than he needs you to? Only because the mission is more important than you, and the CO has chosen to put you on active duty. Let's live boldly and fearlessly, as sentries on duty, never forgetting our mission, but looking forward to the time when the job is done, and we are called into the mess, where a hot meal and a warm bed will be waiting.

Photo by army.mil H/T Alan Chapple

The album is dead, long live the music

2009-01-15T09:52:00.009+09:00

The core of the music industry will never again be the album. Music piracy has presented an insurmountable problem for recording companies, with album sales dropping year-on-year since 2000. Why would you fork out twenty dollars for that new Pink album when you could rip it from your friend's copy, or easier, download the entire thing in seconds through a file sharing program? Unless they're U2, performers and the companies that represent them can no longer turn a profit from an album release.

But none of this spells the end for the music industry. We shouldn't be scared of a future without a soundtrack, or worse, feel sorry for the record labels. Like any changing market, the onus is on the sellers to adapts. And they are adapting. While album sales have been eroding this decade, the price of a ticket to a live show has been rocketing, reportedly up 82% between 1996 and 2003 (inflation over the same period was about 17%). Unthinkable fifteen years ago, $150 concert tickets are now standard for stadium shows like Justin Timberlake or Madonna.

That means the entire business model of the music industry is reshaping toward concerts. The recording industry is very quickly becoming the live show industry. U2 for instance, one of the bands still able to sell records, grossed $150m on their latest album, "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb". But the associated tour grossed $389m. It used to be that the tour was an extended promotion for the album, but no longer. The album is now just a radio- and download-friendly promotion for the lucrative tour. The promoters, rather than the record executives, are now running the show and making the money.

While the industry is undergoing its most fundamental shift in its 100 year history, the outlook from the music-lovers' perspective is far from gloomy. The demise of the record doesn't mean that music will become less acessible; it actually means the opposite. The shifting centre of gravity toward the live show is affecting out interaction with music in two ways.

First, the internet means that any musician with a computer can record and distribute her music directly from their basement. Blogs and sites like MySpace are everywhere linking musicians with audiences. So the future of music is assured. In fact, it looks brighter, because instead of listening to the boring top-40 that the labels and radio stations decide is popular, the whole spectrum of independent musical vision is available to the listener.

Second, it means that performers are being polarized, with the huge stadium $150-ticket acts at one end, and everyone else at the other. For the majority of small, independent acts, this does mean that it's now more difficult to make a lot of money from their music - there's no intermediate stage of comfortable profits to move into. Instead they will have to rely on the cash they can make from live shows. This doesn't mean that the indie performers are going to stop playing or recording music, though. They will just have to work a day-job.

The best bit is that these two outcomes present the listener with a world of interesting, independent music. Because recordings have become promotions for shows rather than marketable products in their own right, more and more artists and labels are giving their music away for free. This means that there thousands of free songs and albums available to download, free and legal, through blogs, record labels and MySpace. And it makes good business sense - you download a few songs, you like what you hear, and next time the act is in town, you don't mind forking out $30 to see them.

So while it may not be quite so easy to make a buck out of music, recording and distribution have been almost fully democratised by the internet, and the listener is the winner. We have a universe of interesting, independent music available for free. So head to the nearest music blog or indie label, download some songs, and enjoy. And think about supporting the acts next time they arrive in town.

You can find links to some of my favourite free music here, here and here. I have also included some links to good blogs and labels under 'pod' in the sidebar.

Photo of Chris Martin by nrtphotos

The rainbow tyrant

2009-01-13T13:50:00.009+09:00

Google completely runs my life. I've used Google for just about everything for the last few years. And when I say everything, I mean just about everything: mail, calendars, documents, rss, news, weather, finance... even this blog. Google's grip hasn't been so tight the last couple of years, since my employer's use of Outlook forced me onto other platforms at least some of the time. But now I have a new job, and everyone uses Google. The stranglehold is complete. I actually spend more time interacting with Google each day than I do with any single person ( perhaps even every person put together).

I spent this morning replying to emails on Gmail, and in between read some blog posts through Google Reader. I added some events to Google Calendar, and was reminded of an appointment later in the day. I converted some currency to work out what a new pair of sunnies would cost, and checked to see if it would be cool enough to go for a cycle later. With, of course, countless Google searches scattered throughout.

But even though I spent the entire morning Googling, I don't resent Google's ubiquity. Rather, I love Google. I've become dependent upon it, but in return Google allows me to do whatever I want, wherever I want. Setting up meetings, editing publications, writing this post, all from my bedroom, or the office, or a park.

There is a scary side, however. Google makes money by advertising. It throws ads up on its services, and hopes you'll click on them. If you don't use Google much, you'll get random ads. But if you use Google a lot, Google know things about you, and it will use this information to target you with ads it thinks you might go for. You searched for ski resorts the other day? Here's an ad for ski gloves. You've got "bible study" in you calendar? Here's an ad for a theological college.

So if you use Google all the time, like me, it knows a huge amount about you. It knows everything you've searched for, all your scheduled events, the content of all your emails, what you blog about, which news stories you read, and so on. I figure that if Google has all this info for me for the past three years, they know more about me than anyone except God.

In fact, I know it knows a lot about me, because in the last few months, Google's ads have become creepily relevant. For a long time, my first couple of years of Googling, say, Google's ads were laughably hit-and-miss. You could tell that they were offering me banana sundaes because that last email asked me to bring the banana lounge to the pool party on Sunday. But recently, Google has been consistently offering me things that I actually want. They have obviously got my profile down pat.

While it feels weird to think a multinational corporation knows you better than your own mother, I'm not too worried about it. I don't think any real person, let alone one with any power, is actually going to access Google's info on me. And if they do, it will be quite a boring read. The most common thing Google offers me is, after all, jobs teaching English overseas.

I'm still excited about Google, though. Their services are useful, easy to use, and make life easier. I'm anticipating with great interest the development of a Google operating system, where all your computing is done through Google. You would turn on your computer, and rather than it booting up Mac OS, it would access an online Google interface. All you documents and photos would be stored on Google Docs, you would listen to your music through GTunes, you would edit your photos in Picasa. Your computer wouldn't even need much hard memory, because Google stores everything for you. If my experience of using Google is anything to go by, Google's impending world domination will be clean and efficient: a utopia of productivity. Google is the benevolent, rainbow-coloured tyrant that you can't resist, even if you want to.

Photo by missha. A taste of the future. The Google logo has been cut into the apple using a laser. A memento from a Google launch.

Wising up

2009-01-08T22:00:00.006+09:00

Educational standards have slipped so far they're in free-fall. The curriculum is being dumbed down to cater for the lowest common denominator. Degrees are handed out like paper towlettes at KFC. They aren't even worth the paper they're printed on. Aren't they?

Lamentations of educational apocalypse have been a staple of the op-ed pages for decades. But it's easy to forget that the general population of the English-speaking world is more literate that it has ever been. A hundred years ago, mass literacy was still a dream - most people would have had trouble making sense of a newspaper article. Even fifty years ago it was far from guaranteed that all your employees would be able to fill in their own tax form. Literacy rates have soared over the last few decades.

And that means that things have never been so good for so-called high culture. Museums, literature, independent films, opera and classical music have never had such large or broad audiences. Far from being a shrivelled vestigal apendage on the side of the voracious beast of popular culture, surviving only by the patronage of a wealthy elite, these art forms are enjoying vigorous lives of their own, finding audiences across the social spectrum. And people aren't giving up thier subscriptions to Sports Illustrated in favour of The New Yorker or discovering that Mahler is better than Radiohead: they're consuming each with equal appetite.

Contrary to the doom-sayers, people are not dumbing down. They're wising up. They're better educated and more cultually aware than they've ever been.

Photo by Piet Musterd

A Year with the Institutes

2009-01-03T15:52:00.004+09:00

John Calvin turns 500 this year, and to celebrate, the Princeton Theological Seminary is inviting people to read through his entire Institutes of Christian Religion over the course of the year.

The Institutes is one of the most important and influential works of theology ever written, and Princeton's programme includes daily readings, and an audio recording of the readings available as a podcast via iTunes, designed to help you get through it by the end of 2009. Details are here. What better way the mark the 500th birthday of this great reformer.

I'm hoping to follow the readings and the podcast through the year and get my head around this huge volume. I may even let you know how I go, or write some of my thoughts about it here.

H/T Ben Myers

Photo by naezmi

The market draws breath

2009-01-02T13:18:00.005+09:00

When a child bumps their chin on the edge of the coffee table, there is that inevitable pause while he draws breath, screws up his face and looks around for an audience, before bursting into tears. That's the point we're at right now, writes Adam Gopnik. Our economy has taken a tumble. Whether we start crying or are distracted by the shiny baubles of bail-outs may determine the scale of the injury.

Music cornucopia

2008-12-08T14:03:00.006+09:00

While you may have heard of (or even listened to) NPR’s flagship programme All Things Considered, but you may not have heard of its sister music programme, All Songs Considered. Originally a programme about the music used in ATC, it has become a regular broadcast of live shows from Washington DC’s 9:30 Club. The programme has recorded over a hundred shows from bands like Radiohead, Arcade Fire, The Demberists, Bjork, Iron & Wine, Neko Case, Tom Waits and Okkervil River.

The good news is that the shows can be downloaded from the NPR website, or better, as a podcast. The recording quality is great and the shows are presented unedited. There are some real musical gems here, like Bon Iver’s beautiful and unassuming set and Death Cab’s Ben Gibbard doing a cover of Such Great Heights (no rival to Iron & Wine’s brilliant cover, but pretty nice nonetheless).

While ASC will give you shows from bands you’ve heard of, there are a couple of blogs that are great for discovering bands you haven’t. The Line of Best Fit is London based and offers reviews and downloads from heaps of acts. On the other side of the Atlantic, RCRD LBL does basically the same thing.

Photo by jgarber

Australia and the New York schools experiment

2008-12-04T10:29:00.004+09:00

New York Schools Chancellor Joel Klein was in Australia last week as the guest of Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard. Klein runs the biggest school district in the US, and in the six years since he was appointed by Mayor Bloomberg has transformed it from one of the worst performing to one of the best performing districts in the country. The interesting thing is that Klein has used simple techniques that every successful business take for granted, but seem to get lost in the education sector – explicit goals, measurable outcomes and transparent analysis of schools’ achievement.

Far from taking education into the cold, elitist territory that would lead unions to decry such techniques, however, Klein’s aim is to achieve parity across all schools, and graduate as many students as possible, both rich and poor. This necessarily means sinking resources, including the best teachers, into the worst schools. But Klein then expects the schools to prove that their students are improving at a rate that justifies the expenditure – and if they don’t, they get shut down and replaced by better schools.

Unsurprisingly, Klein’s techniques are transforming education in New York. A far greater proportion of students are graduating, especially in the most disadvantaged areas. Klein argues that access to quality education is the great social issue facing Western democracies, and in New York his approach seems to be closing the gap.

Julia Gillard met Klein in New York last year and was impressed by his work. His trip to Australia last week coincided with a COAG meeting, where Gillard began a similar process by getting the states to agree to publish data on school performance. No further plans have been announced, but if Gillard follows this path, we could see a real ‘education revolution’ in Australia, rather than the populist and simplistic promise of stacks of computers.

Australia is, admittedly, different to New York – our schools sometimes need to service vast areas and we don’t anything like the levels of poverty in some parts of the US. But the tools that everyone know work in business and science, and seem to be working elsewhere, should be able to produce results in Australia, too. And if there’s anyone to court the education unions on this, it’s the female Deputy Prime Minister from the Left of the ALP.

If you want more info, I enjoyed listening to this interview with Joel Klein on the ABC (you can get the audio by clicking the black box on the left of the page). Or if you have less time, Janet Albrechtsen wrote this for The Australian yesterday.

Photo by Gothamschools

America's "racist belt"

2008-11-07T09:21:00.007+09:00

Here's something interesting. The New York Times put together this map of those counties that, compared to 2004, swung Republican in Tuesay's election. The editors at BuzzFeed, where I first saw the map, called the red area "America's racist belt". While I think racism is not necessarily the only or best explanation for the swing, you have to ask yourself, why would voters in these areas, who voted for John Kerry in the last election, go against the general swing and vote for McCain this year?

The map is part of a larger slideshow, which can be viewed here.

UPDATE: The NYT ran a front-page story yesterday arguing that race was a primary factor is the swing away from the Dems in states like Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi.

In praise of the public library

2008-09-01T18:02:00.008+08:00

The public library is, along with democracy, railways and refined sugar, one of the greatest innovations of Western civilisation. It has completely democratised access to literature and learning and has contributed far more than is credited to the long held, but only recently realised, dream of mass literacy.

Concerned with popular education from its puritan beginnings, it’s not surprising that the public library is an American invention: the first opened in Boston in the 1840s. School and subscription libraries had been around for centuries, and these evolved into the libraries we know today, so it’s hard to say who invented it. But if there were a librarians’ pantheon, it would definitely include Benjamin Franklin, who started the first subscription library in Philadelphia in 1731, and Andrew Carnegie, who bankrolled 1700 new public libraries, bringing the library to suburbs and towns across America.

In Australia, public libraries were much slower to get started, and, due to a lack of Franklins and Carnegies, less well endowed. In 1932, a Carnegie Corporation report into the state of Australian libraries called them “wretched little institutes”. The State Library of NSW was founded in the 1860s, but wasn’t until after the Second World War that governments began taking seriously the idea of public libraries, and only in the 1960s did local governments start building suburban libraries.

Although it took us a while to realise it, the suburban library is the pinnacle of librarial evolution. University and State libraries are important and grand-looking, but, let’s face it, no one actually visits them. The suburban library, on the other hand, attracts a mash-up of punters from every spot in the social landscape, especially in a suburb like Midland.

As a child, my family visited the Midland Public Library almost as often as we visited the shopping centre. In fact, from the day I was presented with my very own laminated membership card, age eight, until now, there has never been a time when my bedroom has not stored part of its collection. It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that the Midland Public Library has been as important to my education as all the schools I’ve ever attended put together. Despite the snotty children and fluorescent glare, I love that place. I love free stuff and I love books, so the place that supplies me with a constant stream of free books is very close to my heart indeed.

I plan to leave Midland next year, and while I won’t miss the town, I will miss its library. It has introduced me to Dickens and Martel, Winterson and Orwell, Hume, Camus, Paul Johnson, Terry Prachett, and everything in between. The ladies know my name, or at least the ones that have worked there for twenty years. And it was all funded by the good rate-payers of the City of Swan.

Although I’ll probably never go, it’s fun to plan a library tour of the world. Where would you visit? The Bodleian and the British Library, of course, the Bibliothèque nationale and the Vatican, then across the ditch to the New York Public Library, Brooklyn (if only for Asher Lev), Yale, Folger, the Library of Congress, and across to that fabulous crystalline building in Seattle. You would discover other libraries along the way, and dig through little second-hand bookshops in between. I may never come home. But I probably will, because not matter how many rarities and columns, no library could ever replace the Midland Public Library.

Photos by andy in nyc and vsz

The glory and the pain: theology with Sufjan

2008-08-23T16:26:00.014+08:00

I’m loving the music of Sufjan Stevens right now. He is not only one of the finest composers and songwriters working at the moment, he is also incredibly theologically aware. His lyrics are a beautiful exploration of faith and the divine in the mundane experiences of life. In my book, he’s up there with Bono and Dylan.

When I discovered Sufjan last summer, he played non-stop in my car for about three months. His song ‘Casimir Pulanski Day’ got the most strenuous workout – I often put this one song on a continuous loop (a cardinal album-lover’s sin, I know) as I drove. But after hearing it a thousand times that summer, I still think it’s the pinnacle of Sufjan’s achievement to date. Listen to the song – as she says in Garden State, it will change your life. It’s also worth reading the lyric.

The song is the story of a boy whose girlfriend is suffering from cancer. The teenagers quitely and intimately share their grief. They pray that God will heal her, “but nothing ever happens”, and the girl dies, with the boy at her side. Strangely, however, throughout this tragic story, Sufjan repeatedly reminds us of “all the glory that the Lord has made”.

What does the glory of the Lord have to do with a boy’s grief as he watches his girlfriend dying? Where is God in this story? He isn’t around – they cry out to him, but he does nothing; the girl dies, and her boyfriend is left heartbroken. But as the nurse draws the sheet over her body, the boy looks out the window and catches a glimpse of God’s face:

All the glory that the Lord has made
And the complications when I see His face
In the morning in the window

What kind of God is this, whose glory is evident even in the most tragic of events? This is the “complication” that the boy experiences – the paradox of finding beauty in the midst of death and seeing God in the midst of tragedy. What is the boy to make of this encounter?

The vital clue comes in the last verse of the song. We have seen God’s glory in a death once before, “when he took our place”. Because Christ died in our place, his glory now shines everywhere, even in our grief. Death is no longer hopeless, but filled with promise. The characters in the song will reunite one day, when death finally releases its hold on them, God brings them back to life, and they pick up where they left off. Even after the girl's death, the boy anticipates the imminence of this holy day:

In the morning in the winter shade
On the first of March, on the holiday
I thought I saw you breathing

God is not absent in this story: "He takes and He takes and He takes". He takes our place, and he takes our pain, and he takes our death. Christ’s death and resurrection has radically reshaped the fabric of life and the world. Because God will one day reverse the effects of death and suffering, even our most heartbreaking experiences are no longer truly tragic. The glory of God’s coming kingdom illuminates all of life, recasting it in hope and joy.

Photo by Zach Klein, H/T Ben Myers

A bit rich

2008-08-12T16:29:00.006+08:00

In last Saturday’s Weekend Australian Magazine, five families, each with a combined income of over $150,000, bemoan the difficulty of making ends meet. In a country with an average income of around $50,000, and a standard of living amongst the highest in the world, this is an outrageous example of popular delusion.

And popular it is. Nearly two-thirds of Australians believe they can't buy everything they need. The Rudd government rode into office last year on the back of the public perception that the cost of living is too high. Working families can’t make ends meet, we were told ad nauseam. The cost of energy, groceries and credit dominated the news cycle, and continue to do so.

This despite the fact that there has never been a time in history when these commodities have been so accessible to so many. The standard of living in Australia has been rising steadily throughout its history, and is amongst the highest experienced by any group in human history. Earning an average wage in Australia puts you within the top 2% of the world's rich.

The problem is that expectations have outpaced even the abundance the Australian economy provides. A new car, a McMansion filled with new appliances and a yearly holiday are considered a basic standard, and credit is so cheap that it doesn’t matter how much debt you accrue to achieve it. There’s no wonder that people are worried: we are labouring under a grand delusion. No economy in history has provided such a standard of living.

We are victims of a self-fulfilling prophecy of economic ambition. People are greedy and materialistic, and therefore unsatisfied with their current wealth. We aspire to own a newer car, a bigger TV and a house in a better area. Politicians play on this aspiration by telling us that yes, you are poor, it is difficult to make ends meet, you are entitled to more, and we can provide it, if only you vote for us. Journalists repeat our dissatisfaction back to us, because it’s what we want to hear. And so our economic ambition is affirmed and sanctified.

There is no greater god in our pantheon than economic ambition, the Great Australian Dream, and millions are sacrificing their lives on its altar. But the Dream is a fickle god that demands everything and delivers nothing but incessant dissatisfaction and 200 square metres of polished hardwood floors.

Photo by Dean Terry

Unstent NZ eccint

2008-08-09T17:20:00.007+08:00

All Australians know how funny (both senses of the word) the New Zealand accent is, and how difficult it is to imitate. Fortunately, help is at hand. After extensive research in the field, consisting primarily of a close viewing of the brilliant TV show Flight of the Conchords, I have developed an easy-to-follow two step pathway to an instant NZ accent. Here it is:

Pronounce all consonants, all hard vowels, and the soft vowel ‘o’ (as in ‘pot’) as you would in your usual Australian accent.
Shift each remaining soft vowel (‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’ and ‘u’) one place down the alphabet.

So that means you pronounce:

‘a’ as ‘e’ (so, for example, ‘hat’ becomes ‘het’)
‘e’ as ‘i’ (so ‘leg’ becomes ‘lig’)
‘i’ as ‘u’ (so ‘chips’ becomes ‘chups’)
‘u’ as ‘a’ (so ‘mug’ becomes ‘mag’)*

Now thet your NZ eccint us pufictid, hev fan umprissung your mates and pussung off the Noo Zilender chuck thet serves you et IGA wuth how crep your ummutation rilly us.

*This last rule isn’t quite true. Really ‘u’ should be pronounced as the indefinite vowel (like the sound at the end of ‘doctor’). Actually, none of these rule are really correct: New Zealanders use a crazy range of vowels that are unknown to the English language in any other corner of Her Majesty’s current and former realms. But the rules are close enough that once you start using them, you should be able to hear the NZ coming through, and adjust the sounds as you git bitter.

Photo by inconstanti

Now hear this

2008-08-07T20:09:00.009+08:00

After a long hiatus, it's time to recussitate the blog. And in response to some gentle encouragement, I'm planning to find the time to post regularly again. So here's the first of (hopefully) many.

I few months ago I posted a list of links to free music downloads. Many bands give away songs to promote their work, so there's lots of free, legal music out there to download. Since my last post, I've discovered a few more tracks worth listening to.

Damien Jurado
Band of Horses
Explosions in the Sky (here and full album The Rescue)
The National
TV on the Radio

Damien Jurado's catchy, honest, indie rock has become one of my favourite in-car sounds recently, and I may soon buy one of his albums (the purpose of the give-away, after all). Actually, since writing the previous post on free music, I've gone on to buy two Sufjan albums and one by the Decemberists. If you like what you hear, consider exploring further and supporting these excptional artists.

Photo (of Sufjan in amazing goose wings) by Joe Lecioni

Random thoughts on translation

2008-04-10T21:18:00.002+08:00

It seems to me that translating from one language into another… is like viewing Flemish tapestries from the wrong side, when, although one can make out the figures, they are covered by threads that obscure them, and one cannot appreciate the smooth finish on the right side.
- Don Quixote

Cervantes loves to put pithy observations in the mouth of his pathetic hero, and as usual Quixote is right on the money, although he probably doesn’t realize it. His remark applies equally to reading works in translation. It’s such a frustrating task. You squint, trying to make out the figures. They float in front of you in outline, but the fine detail is obscured and they never quite coalesce into something graspable.

Translations never feel right, either. The poesy is buried under approximate meaning, and what must feel like silk in Russian or Spanish becomes course and rigid. You start rewriting passages in your head just to get some rhythm into the text, but you’re no better at it than the translator. That’s why translated poetry is never more than a dismal failure – you can’t get all the allusions, all the rhythms, all the sounds into the text – and it’s exactly the same for novels, especially great ones.

Every time you read a translated novel you tell yourself it will be the last. But it’s an impossible promise to keep. There’s always another must-read novel. A life with frustrating Dostoevsky is better than a life with no Dostoevsky at all.

Maybe you’re asking too much of the translation. A translation, after all, tells you more about the translator than it does the work itself. You aren’t listening to the text, of course, but to the translator, as she describes what she is hearing. The work is second hand, filtered through another pair of ears, and is only ever going to reflect how the translator hears. Hopefully she hears in a similar way to the author.

But the amazing thing is not that translations are so bad, but that they work at all. The quote at the top has itself been translated from the Spanish, but you still get the gist. How can that happen? How could Cervantes, writing all those centuries ago, have had the same frame of reference to you? Perhaps you have a common experience: of tapestries, for instance. If so, then what about texts from completely alien cultures? How can their ideas be expressed in your language? There must be some common ground of human experience that founds all cultures and languages.

The common ground is especially important for Bible translators. Separated by two thousand years and ten thousand miles, the fact that you can make sense of Paul, a first century Jewish scholar, is astonishing. Granted, reading Paul requires a little more thought and contextual understanding than does, say, Hugo, but even the least literate can make some sense of him. We have access to Paul’s gospel because we share something vital with the apostle.

The translator’s task is difficult and thankless. She is asked to speak across cultures and render a community’s thoughts intelligible to those with whom they never speak. Her project is fated to fail, because no translation can be perfect; she can never convey ever reference, nuance and allusion. At best she can only sketch rough outlines. But it is better to see vaguely, as in a mirror, than never at all, and for their service we owe translators our respect and gratitude.

Photo by Kiwanc

Check out CPX

2008-03-25T11:42:00.003+09:00

John Dickson and Greg Clarke have a new venture, the Centre for Plublic Christianity. They aim to present the Christian message through a wide range of media including video, print publication and short courses, and have already had some notable successes. The recently lanched CPX website hosts some great vodcast and print resources; they're intelligent, relevant and hold to refeshingly high production values. Well worth bookmarking.

H/T Rory

How observant are you?

2008-03-20T09:35:00.002+09:00

Take the test and find out.

Behold your God

2008-03-18T15:13:00.006+09:00

We must discard the “god who is there to hold your hand, solve your problems, rescue you from your trials and tribulations, the deus ex machina,” writes Kim Fabricius on F&T. Instead, he proposes that on Good Friday we focus on this image, Holbein’s Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, the pathetic, crushed, vacant carcass of the God who has been defeated. This Friday God is not with us; he has descended into hell. But it is in this very powerlessness, lying cold and rotting in the tomb, that Christ comes to us and identifies with us. Only the despair of Friday could make the hope of Sunday possible.

Sans Comic Sans

2008-03-15T12:31:00.007+09:00

As a teacher, I’m daily subjected to the insidious Microsoft font Comic Sans. You wouldn’t believe how pervasive this font has become in the educational world. Everything from text books to memos is typeset in Comic Sans. ‘Educationalists’ use the font in the misguided belief that it’s ‘fun’ and therefore will ‘engage’ students in ways that a more mature font cannot. I’ve come to accept this as one of the lesser evils of public education. But yesterday I received an email that provoked me to action.

The email was from a leading educational body here in Perth and outlined some important changes to the assessment policy for the higher level Year 12 English courses. It was typeset in Comic Sans. Had the email announced a festival or party, the use of Comic Sans may have almost been forgivable. But this email was a very formal, very serious policy statement that directly affects the university entrance of a third of Year 12 students in WA.

The use of Comic Sans is a problem because, like a tone of voice, fonts convey meaning. Comic Sans was first developed by Microsoft for use in comic book style speech bubbles that offered help in its Windows 95 operating system. The font was to be used for short, informal comments, and is therefore designed to convey informality, irreverence and naivety. It is inappropriate to use Comic Sans for any other text type. As the noble crusaders at bancomicsans.com say, it’s “analogous to showing up for a black tie event in a clown costume.”

But the pervasiveness of Comic Sans is not confined to the educational sphere. It seems that everywhere you look the font is being used in the most inappropriate ways. From restaurant menus to software manuals, Comic Sans is taking over. The problem is not just the indiscriminate use of the font, but its sheer popularity. We are in the grip of an epidemic of childish typography.

It is time to call a stop to the indiscriminate and unjustifiable use of Comic Sans. It is a stain on the illustrious history of typography and must be eradicated. You can be part of the solution: refrain from using Comic Sans and spread the good word of appropriate typesetting. Together wa can build a new world sans Comic Sans.

Picture by bancomicsans.com

Free music

2008-03-08T15:42:00.005+09:00

Loads of bands and record labels have realised it’s worth giving away a few songs as ‘tasters’. As a result, there’s lots of free, legal music available to be downloaded from the net. You won’t find international super-acts like Coldplay or Pink giving away their song – their huge marketing budgets mean they don’t have to – but virtually everyone else is (and why would you listen to Coldplay or Pink anyway?).

The easiest way to find free legal music is to search for it through Google. It’s best to only download music from the official website of a band or record label, because you know it’s legit. There are loads of other sites that claim to host ‘legal’ downloads; most of them are legitimate, but not all.

A great place to start looking is music.download.com, a slick site where many bands post their free tracks. Another really useful resource is Finger Tips Music, whose Select Artist Guide features direct links to the much of the best free music on the net. I've also put links to some of my favs below.

Some great artists that are giving it away:
Sufjan Stevens (here and here)
The Decemberists
Death Cab For Cutie (here and here)
Television Hill
Sigur Ros
Tom Waits
Iron and Wine
The Shins
Augie March
Spectacular Fantastic

Some fine record labels known for their generosity:
Sub Pop
Asthmatic Kitty
Anti
Epitonic

H/T Jeff Hunt for putting me on to free music.

The authentic bogan, or, Why Dickens makes me think I should don a singlet and chug a choc milk

2008-03-06T16:56:00.006+09:00

In his essay on Dickens, George Orwell pings the novelist for being a snob. While Dickens is often called a ‘champion of the oppressed masses’, Orwell argues that he is actually revolted by the poor. His slums are filled with repulsive odours and depraved souls. And his heroes, while often of the most downtrodden extraction, are always gentlemen. Pip, for example, in Great Expectations, speaks with an upper-class accent from the earliest age, even though he’s brought up by a blacksmith.

The reason for this, Orwell argues, is that while Dickens was concerned for the poor, or at least those he saw as the deserving poor, he never wanted to resemble them. In an autobiographical fragment, Dickens admits that the greatest horror of his childhood experience in the blacking factory was not the work but the people he was forced to associate with. Like many of his heroes, Pip is representative of Dickens himself; he can’t allow them to be anything other than gentlemen, even when it’s ridiculous.

In his essay, Orwell compares Dickens to a “modern doctrinaire Socialist contemptuously writing off a huge block of the population as ‘lumpenproletariat’.” He could have equally compared Dickens to the modern Christian. We show the utmost sympathy for the poor and oppressed. We say the gospel is for everyone, that God uses the foolish things to put the wise to shame, that we should be all things to all people in order to win some. All these things are true. But while we show such concern for the poor, are we, like Dickens, revolted by the idea of seeming poor? Are we snobs?

I know I am. While I say the evangelical epithets, the way I speak, the way I dress and things I do, reveal that I’m a snob of Dickensian proportions. If I’m honest, I’m often horrified by bogan culture, and I spend a lot of energy not being one. But there's a lot of bogans in Perth. I work with bogans, shop with bogans and live near bogans. I am surrounded by a huge field of bogans waiting to be harvested. But I refuse to be one of them, and relinquish any chance of relating to them.

Sometimes I think I should change my accent, clothes and pass-times to something more in line with the surrounding culture. If I’m to be all things to all people in Perth, perhaps I should be a bogan. Would that be inauthentic? I don’t think so. It’s inauthentic to claim Christ’s mind, yet remain a snob. It’s inauthentic to claim that the gospel is for everyone, yet withhold it from those that seem foolish. The only way to be authentically Christian is to love. If loving bogans means becoming a bogan, it would be inauthentic to be anything else.

What is it?

2008-02-16T15:03:00.004+09:00

The ABC TV show Collectors features a regular segment in which members of the public are presented with a “mystery object” (like the one pictured, used in last week's show) and asked, “What is it?” The object’s use is never apparent and punters speculate wildly, usually without much luck. Then the object is presented to the expert panel, who put their heads together and work out its purpose.

The segment is entertaining enough, but the interesting part is the question. The public and the panel are actually asked “What is it?” but implied questions is “What is it used for?” And this implies another question: “For what purpose did the designer intend it?”

The question “What is it?” doesn’t necessarily imply the question “What is its use?” Asked “What is it?” you could sensibly answer the question by describing the object: it’s made of wood, it’s cylindrical, it has a hollow area on one end. But this never happens. What asked “What is it?” punters invariably speculate on the object’s use. An inkwell? or some kind of bobbin, perhaps?

By assuming the implied question of use, the punters unconsciously recognise that the object’s nature is not defined by its physical attributes, but by its purpose. And when asked “What is it?” no one says “It’s an inkwell, because that is what I would use it for.” They assume that there are right and wrong answers: that it’s the designer that gets to impart purpose, not the user.

The punters and the panel both recognise a truth that often gets lost. Things are not defined by their attributes – a description does not confer meaning. Nor are things defined by their user (or the thing itself) – the thing is designed for a certain purpose, and it is that purpose that confers meaning upon the thing. And things find their meaning in fulfilling their purpose. When this happens, the designer is respected and the object dignified.

Summer days

2008-01-21T16:53:00.000+09:00

I've been away over the summer and will be away again this week. Apologies for the lack of posts. Posting will continue once I get back into the swing of normal life on 29 January. Hope your summer has been as relaxing and fun as mine.

Photo by macieklew

He will come

2007-12-19T11:13:00.000+09:00

Advent Calendar

He will come like last leaf’s fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud’s folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

Rowan Williams

Have a wonderful Christmas.

From The Poems of Rowan Willimas, Eerdmans, 2004
Photo by mdumlao98

The Oz says it right

2007-11-28T09:11:00.000+09:00

From yesterday's editorial in The Australian:

The Australian's Beijing correspondent, Rowan Callick, watched the election with Chinese officials, and their amazement at what happened on Saturday night is revealing. As Callick reported yesterday, Chinese diplomats were agog at the very idea of a government being turfed out overnight and were fascinated at the civility of the leaders. They were amazed that outgoing prime minister Mr Howard had the dignity to address the people in the face of such a crushing defeat and at the generosity of Kevin Rudd's acceptance speech. Whatever their political views, all Australians should be proud of the exemplary way in which the elections were conducted.

Sometimes we need to be reminded that we're doing something extraordinary. They said it right that time.

A Freudian slip and a fond farewell

2007-11-24T22:08:00.000+09:00

About half way through tonight's election coverage, Kerry O'Brien said,
"It seems we're looking at a swing to the ABC of 5.1%."
Gold.

On another note, Mr Howard has not only lost the Prime Ministership, but also his seat. Despite some less-than-compassionate policies on refugees, Iraq, civil liberties and, until recently, indigenous affairs, Mr Howard has faithfully served this country for thirty-three years, and has led Australia through one of its most prosperous eras. He has worked tirelessly to achieve what he saw as in our best interest. Whether Howard-haters or Howard-battlers, we all owe the former PM a debt of gratitude.

Lastly, we thank God that we live in a place where our biggest problem on election day is the queue.

(Kerry also used the word "we" with reference to the ALP. Does he even know he's doing it?)

Christianity and…

2007-11-20T10:07:00.000+09:00

Over the last week I’ve been listening to the Mars Hill lecture series “Christianity and…”. It’s well worth a listen. Don’t let the word ‘lecture’ put you off – they’re topical talks aimed at a wide audience, so they’re really accessible. You can download the talks here, or you can get them downloaded automatically by subscribing to the Resurgence podcast.

The talks on Christianity and Liberalism and Christianity and Conservatism suffer a little from the peculiar American meanings of these words (although the speakers try hard to give a broad perspective), but the talks on Christianity and Trinitarianism and Christianity and Culture are first rate. Christianity and Trinitarianism takes us through the huge implications of God’s Trinitarian nature, while Christianity and Culture shows us how the church is the place where the gospel and culture intersect, not clash. The talks explore ideas integral to Christianity in a way that is interesting and very easy to understand.

Photo by borkur.net

I'm ok, you're ok?

2007-11-14T11:33:00.000+09:00

Some thoughts on evangelistic starting points

Earlier this year, Unichurch hosted an evangelistic speaker over three nights. He was engaging and articulated the gospel faithfully, but I couldn’t help cringing at his approach. While each if his talk was different, they all followed the same logic: you are bad → God requires perfection → you can’t achieve perfection → so you are condemned to death → but Christ can achieve perfection→ and he takes our place in death → so you don’t have to die.

The logic itself is true – Paul would agree with it. My problem was that I couldn’t imagine the non-Christians in the audience going for it. For them to accept this gospel, they first had to accept that they are bad. While individual guilt may have been a given fifty years ago, people today don’t think they are all that bad. They’re ok; they keep to themselves and do their best no to hurt anyone. If anything is bad, it’s governments or corporations. If we tell people they are bad, they will just think that we are arrogant.

But isn’t this the gospel? Won’t we just have to find a way to convince people that they are bad? I don’t think so. Paul didn’t think that someone had to accept their personal guilt to become a Christian. He only thought they had to accept Christ’s right to rule. It seems that Paul didn’t even realise he was bad when he became a Christian. In Philippians 3, he says that, as a Pharisee, he was faultless before the law. Of course, Paul does make it very clear that everyone is guilty before God, but it seems that he only came to this understanding after he became a Christian.

And Jesus agrees. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus isn’t trying to convince his disciples how bad they are, so they will despair and cry out for a solution. Rather, he assumes that God is already their ruler, and explains the implications for their behaviour. That is, Jesus and Paul both see the gospel as the good news that Christ is the king, rather than a solution to individuals’ guilt. Once someone recognises Christ’s kingship, they will recognise their guilt and change their behaviour. But they don’t need to accept their guilt in order to accept Christ.

The centrality of guilt in our traditional presentation of the gospel comes more from Luther than Paul or Jesus. Luther was paralysed by his sense of personal guilt and searched the scriptures for a solution. He found his solution in justification by faith. The problem is that most of us don’t have such a struggle. But guilt has dominated Protestant presentations of the gospel ever since.

And in some ways, guilt actually undermines the gospel. The idea that the gospel is a solution to your personal guilt before God is very individualistic. It reduces the gospel to your own special deal with God. You say the magic words, God accepts you and you get a free ticket into heaven. It neglects the core of the gospel: Christ’s place as king and our place in his community.

Personal guilt has failed as an evangelistic device, but the gospel hasn’t. We don’t need to convince people that they are bad to make them Christian. There are lots of other starting points. We can show the attractiveness of Jesus – through our stories and through our actions. We can offer a solution to the mess we're in by explaining the end to which Christ is drawing the world – his plan to renew the earth and populate it with his loving community. And we can welcome people into this community now. When someone accepts Christ’s rule, they become a part of this community and share in the benefits, both now and in the future. Of course, at some stage we will have to tell people that they are bad, just as Paul told the Roman Christians. But guilt is an implication of Christ’s rule, not the other way around. Once someone recognises that Christ is king, it’s then time to explain how to live accordingly.

Photo by Pensiero

iSermons: maximise your Bible

2007-10-30T13:49:00.000+09:00

If you're a Christian, it's probably because you've heard some good sermons. Preaching is one of the the primary ways we learn about the Bible and how to be a Christian. Most of us hear only one Bible talk each week. But most churches now post recordings of their weekly sermons on the internet, so there's thousands of hours of free preaching ready to be downloaded to your iPod. Some good places to start are:

Mars Hill Church in Seattle
John Piper's website Desiring God
The Resurgence
Sydney Anglicans
And, of course, Unichurch

All of these churches also podcast their sermons. This means that you can get iTunes to automatically download the sermons as soon as they become available. All you need to do is go to the iTunes store, search for the church under ‘Podcasts’ and click ‘Subscribe’. You can subscribe to as many podcasts as you like, and they’re usually free. If you don’t have iTunes, you can download it here.

So download some talks and start listening. If you don’t have an iPod, get one. You can get a 1GB iPod Shuffle for $99. That’s big enough to hold 100 sermons and small enough to clip to your shirt while you run. It's money well spent. Don’t have time to listen to iSermons? You don’t need it. I don’t set aside time to listen; I just listen while I exercise and while I drive. And if, like me, you have a crappy car with only a tape deck, you can get a tape adaptor that plugs into you iPod for $20-30.

If you’re a poor student with no internet at home, here’s a tip. You can download talks at uni, but if your uni charges you for internet usage (as mine did) this can be expensive. While at UWA, I discovered that the Mars Hill Church site was ‘sponsored’, so I download their talks for free. The best way to find out if a site is free is to log on as a ‘guest’ and see what they let you do. And for UWA students, the Christian Union hosts their talks on the UWA website, so you can download them for free from any computer on campus.

iSermons are helpful, but we should also remember that church is much more than just hearing talks. Church is about getting together with other Christians, encouraging each other and worshiping God. iSermons can never replace church, only supplement it. Nor can they replace your local pastor’s talks. Your pastor knows you and writes his talks with you in mind. You need to hear what he has to say. That said, iSermons are a great way to maximise your Bible through the week.

Photo by Pierre Lesage

Sermon on the Mount in four words?

2007-10-25T11:13:00.000+08:00

Over the last six weeks at Hub (Unichurch’s small group bible study) we have been reading the Sermon on the Mount. Having come to the end of Matthew chapter 6, our group was thinking about how we could summarise Jesus’ message. We came up with:

“Who is your god?”

As we read the sermon, we realised that Jesus wasn’t so much proclaiming an ethic as an attitude. An attitude toward what? In the end, an attitude toward God. Either God is your god, or something else is. And the nature of your god has implications for the way you act and relate to others. Rather than looking for loopholes in the law, God’s person maximises her righteousness, always looking for ways to do good. Her eyes are focussed on God and her hand always point to him, never to herself. And she always recognises the value of things, knowing God provides every good thing in abundance.

We all serve somebody. The way we live shows who that is. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus confronts us not with an insurmountable moral mountain but with a question. What is your focus? Who do you serve? What is your goal? Who is your god?

Photo by Fluox

Who on first? I don't give a darn!

2007-10-22T21:23:00.000+08:00

Australia is currently enduring the tedium of a federal election campaign, and with less daylight between the major parties than Steve Irwin and a hapless croc (too soon?), I'm struggling to decide who to vote for.

On the one hand, if the Libs win, it’s quite probable that sometime in the near future Australia will be led by an Abbott and Costello one-two. That would be pretty sweet.

On the other hand, my mum can’t stand Kevin Rudd. She calls him "the ostentatious prefect" and visibly squirms when she sees him on TV. I think it has something to do with his proper diction and the way he speaks by only moving his bottom lip. Her aversion borders on the pathological; it would be fun to see her reaction if Rudd wins.

You can tell it’s a boring campaign.

Photo by JohnnyCashsAshes

Cyber-evangelist

2007-10-21T10:27:00.001+08:00

With the federal government spending millions on censorship software for home internet browsing and terms like ‘cyber-predator’ becoming the regular fare of tabloid journalism, it seems a lot of fear is being generated around the internet. Amid the scare-mongering, it’s easy to forget that it isn’t the technology itself that’s evil; it’s just that evil people use it to do evil (and that’s been happening forever). The internet certainly makes some evil easier and more accessible. But this doesn’t mean we should reject the technology itself.

Rather, we should recognise it’s power as a tool for good. Blogs and social networking allow us to encourage and share the gospel with more and more varied people than we might meet in day-to-day life. iSermons are available from heaps of churches, including our own Unichurch. In a recent post, Dave Elsing tells us how a mate uses Xbox to meet and evangelise gamers from around the world. And at oneofusmustknow, Jeff has argued that Second Life (the object of much cyber-fear) offers a great opportunity to tell people about Christ.

Fear is not a valid response for the Christian. It’s great to see people finding innovative ways to engage with the world and build Christ’s kingdom.

Check these guys out

2007-10-05T10:59:00.000+08:00

Over at Frankly Mr Shankly, Rory asks whether listening to iSermons is just as good as the real, live, local thing. With so many people now downloading sermons from around the world to their iPod, will we see an "iHarvest of righteousness", as Rory puts it, or are recorded sermons somehow deficient?

I think it's both. I'm a fan of the iSermon, and I've been changed for the better by them. But the relationship between the live preacher and his local congregation provides an important common ground of trust and understanding.

Elsewhere, Jeff at One Of Us Must Know has finished his passionate and informative series on "How to buy an album". I like Jeff's high view of music in these posts, although I struggle to live up to his stringent music-lovers' programme!

Lastly, Sydney pastor Byron has been posting recently on the topic of love on his blog Nothing New Under The Sun. Byron's posts have been a huge source of encouragement to me over the past year, especially his series "Heaven: it's not the end of the world". I would buy an internet connection just to read Nothing New. Check it out.

The manipulative music of The West Wing

2007-10-01T14:12:00.000+08:00

While The West Wing is by far the best written and best produced TV show ever made, it’s also irredeemably earnest and romantic. The show takes us to the edge of our cringe tolerance, and then, about five minutes from the end of the episode, pushes that little bit further with a hand-on-heart monologue. “I like the show,” my brother commented last week, “but I can never get through a whole episode without throwing up.”

But the romance is very beguiling. Watching an episode never fails to inspire. By the end of forty-five minutes I’ve resolved to work harder, think harder, read harder. I’m going to enrol in law school, start a charity, cure cancer and solve world poverty. From the opening music that makes me sit up, put my hand to my heart and involuntarily shout “God bless America!” while the tears roll down my face, to the President’s speech about “Why We Do This”, it’s impossible not to buy into the show’s positivism.

Until the closing credits, that is. When I hear that tinkly music, all I can think of is a happy little elf, with eyes bigger than its head, skipping through a cartoon field of flowers and furry animals. “Hello, Mr Bunny Rabbit! Hello, Mrs Fawn! Isn’t it a beautiful day!!” the elf says as it passes by. Law school and world poverty are instantly forgotten, and I just want to eat candy.

Maybe the show’s creators chose the music for a purpose. The opening score pulls us into the patriotic world of The West Wing, while the closing music throws cold water over our unattainable aspirations before we do something rash. It reminds us that, while The West Wing is a nice dream, it is still only a dream.

How much does a life weigh?

2007-09-25T10:28:00.000+08:00

Precisely twenty-one grams, we are told by Dr MacDougall of Massachusetts, who in 1907 put several dying patients on a scale and reportedly noticed a sudden drop in their weight at the moment of death. The results were soon discredited, but the unusual experiment still resonates.

Almost a hundred years later, Alejandro González Iñárritu referred to the experiment in the title of his film 21 Grams. A man and his two daughters are run down and killed crossing the street, and the film follows the repercussions of the deaths for those left behind. The man driving the car is crazed with guilt and attempts suicide. The distraught widow finds solace in cocaine and revenge. A third character, who receives a heart from the dead father, finds the widow, and together they plan to kill the driver. The film ends in a mess of blood and broken relationships. “How much does a life weigh?” asks a narrator at the end of the film. A great deal, we conclude, when we imagine the pain and destruction a death causes to those around it.

But what about the old man without a family, who dies in his home and isn’t discovered until the neighbours smell something strange? Does his life weigh less? 21 Grams would say so. In some respects the film is right – the old man’s life will leave little pain behind it. But the Bible gives us a different picture. God doesn’t value a life by its relationships to other people, but by its relationship to himself.

At Unichurch last Sunday night, Rory preached on the fifth commandment, “do not murder”. He argued that God values a life more than anything else, because God created the life and owns the life. Life is afforded the honour and dignity due to God, because it bears the image of the one who created it. We see God’s value of life most clearly when we consider what he did through Christ: God gave up his Son to death so that we could have life.

How much does a life weigh? Iñárritu was on the right track when he said it was hefty, but he drastically underestimated. Death is tragic because it breaks relationships and causes pain. But more than that, death desecrates God’s image, robs him of his most valued possession and destroys everything good. To God, life is the heaviest thing there is.

Photo by glowingstar

Is The World We All Want anti-Semitic?

2007-09-12T13:16:00.000+08:00

In a comment on the previous post, James pointed out that the wording of Session Three of The World We All Want could create the impression that, because Israel failed to obey God, they were abandoned and replaced by “God’s new people” (see James’s comment for the offending statement). Although the writers didn’t mean to create this impression (see my reply), it is a legitimate problem, because the Bible makes it clear that this is not the case.

Firstly, the OT prophets tell us that Israel did indeed fail. God liberated them from Egypt and promised them a land of plenty and security if they would follow and obey him. But they didn't, so their community was broken and they were violently removed from the land.

The recognition of Israel’s failure is not, however, anti-Semitic. Israel’s failure is a type of every person’s failure to follow and obey God. Just as Israel’s liberation looks forward to the work achieved by Christ, so the promised land of Canaan looks forward to the new world that Christ will bring.

Christ wasn't plan B, hastily thrown together after plan A failed. Christ was always plan A. The fact that Israel failed, even when they had the advantage of the law and the prophets, shows us that none of us have a hope of pleasing God. Israel was a representation of humanity’s malaise. But it was also a type of the church - the community of people that will be chosen, rescued and will live with God is a land of plenty and justice.

Jesus was Jewish, and the gospel was first for the Jews. The Jews are not abandoned; rather they are the first recipients of Christ's revelation and blessing. The first church was at Jerusalem and the message of Christ is still available for them. The amazing thing is not that the Jews are still accepted, but that Christ's blessing is extended to everyone else - just as God promised Abram it would be.

As a Jew, Jesus directly identifies himself with those who fail. He is one of us, and as such he is able to represent us before God. This means that Israel was also a type of Christ; while God’s chosen people failed to obey him, God’s chosen man obeyed him perfectly. The Jews were unable to create a new world, but Christ is and will.

We all fail, just like Israel failed. And just like Israel, we have ruined the world that God has given us. The good news is that God isn’t content to leave us in this situation, but has a plan to rescue a people, change them and create a new world of plenty and security for them to live in. The Jews were and are included in this plan. God’s new people doesn’t replace the Jews, but fulfills God’s promise to bless everyone, both Jew and gentile, through Jesus.

The world we all want

2007-09-06T12:37:00.000+08:00

At Unichurch we have a weekly communal Bible study called Hub on Tuesday evenings. This semester we have used Crowded House’s evangelistic series The World We All Want. The series’ great strength is its eschatological focus – the controlling idea is God’s promise that one day he will make the world a good place – the world we all want.

After showing that God promises this world in the first session, The World We All Want goes on to show that Christ gave a preview of this world in the way he lived and his miracles. Then we see that the present state of the world is our fault, and that Christ makes this new world possible. We are unable to change the world ourselves; all we have to do to be part of it is trust that Christ will keep his promise to do it.

I’ve become a fan of the evangelistic approach these studies take. Rather than starting at creation, sin or Jesus, these studies start at the end, with the promised new world. I’ve heard lots of talks that use guilt (of sin) and fear (of condemnation) to sell the gospel message. This isn’t wrong; sin and condemnation are real problems. But I can’t help feeling that people will be repulsed when they are told they are dirty and hell-bound. The no longer feel the shame that this approach requires; they are not asking, “how can I be right?” but, “what’s in it for me?”

The World We All Want answers this question in a helpful and hopeful way. It appeals to the one thing that everyone agrees on – that the world is not as it should be – and promise change. It don’t shirk sin – there’s a whole session devoted to it – but revises it in terms of our responsibility for the present state of the world. Christ is presented as the one man that can and will bring this new world, and has made it possible through his death. Importantly, these studies explain faith as trusting Jesus to keep his promise, rather than a blind leap. We are left with two stark questions: do I want to be part of this world, and will I trust that Jesus will do it?

The World We All Want does have its problems. The trajectory of each session is not very logical and the conclusions are often implied rather than stated. These problems are not fatal – the studies just require a bit of work to fill in the gaps and strengthen the conclusion. But once this is done, the studies offer a presentation of the gospel that is fresh, attractive and relevant.

On the hill and in the hill

2007-09-03T16:33:00.000+08:00

You can tell a lot about a group of people from the way they build their buildings. As every cashed-up regime from the Egyptians to the Nazis has shown us, this is most obvious in large public buildings.

Think about the three parliament buildings we see most often on TV: the US Capitol, the British Houses of Parliament and the Australian Federal Parliament building.

The US Capitol looks like a Romans temple. This fits with America’s self-image as the rightful heir to the Graeco-Roman tradition (at least the cool bits like citizenship, columns and big armies). The Capitol is towering, domed, white, rational and very impressive.

In contrast, the British Parliament looks like a gothic cathedral, or more accurately a few gothic cathedrals mashed together. Like the US, the British also saw themselves at the new Romans, especially at the height of their imperial success (think the British Museum). But the British weren’t so crass as to put their legislators in a temple. So they put them in a church instead. Still towering, still impressive, but a bit less in-your-face.

Now think of the Australian Federal Parliament. It makes no obvious reference to historical centres of power. It isn’t towering (except for that stupid disproportionate flag pole), and it isn’t impressive. In fact, it’s built inside a hill. There’s grass growing on top of it.

What does this say about the way Australians view themselves? Australians think of themselves as humble, honest and unassuming. Not afraid to get our hands dirty, no pretensions to greatness. We see ourselves as anti-establishment and anti-tradition; we like to think we’re charmingly irreverent, but maybe we’re just ignorant. But we also like to be noticed, so after burying our Parliament inside a hill, we cap it off with a monstrous aluminium quadruped.

And what does this building say about our attitude to our parliamentarians? We certainly don’t see them as gods, or even nobles. We might say they are our equals, but we put them underground, so they are really just a little lower than us.

I suppose it isn’t any better or worse to put your legislators in a hill rather than in a church or a temple. But it is interesting, unprecedented and just a little weird.

Virulent education

2007-08-16T11:59:00.000+08:00

Getting an education is like a communicable sexual disease. It makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you have the urge to pass it on.

- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

Choose your ten thousand wisely

2007-08-06T15:45:00.000+08:00

Brace yourself: this may be the geekiest thing you have ever heard. When I think about how many good books there are in the world and how little time I have to read them, I panic very slightly.

This problem hit me a few years ago, when I was at uni. I was studying in the Reid Library at UWA when a group of high school students, on a tour of the library, were led past my desk. As they passed, a student asked the librarian how many books were in the library. The librarian answered that the UWA library held over a million items. I did some quick sums in my head and proceeded to have a small, quiet mental breakdown as I sat at my desk.

The sums went something like this. Say I have read an average of one book each week since I was born. This means that I have read around 1200 books so far. Now let’s say I up the ante and read an average of two books each week until I’m eighty. This means that I will get to read another 6200 books before I die. That’s 7400 books that I get to read in my life, assuming I get to a ripe old age. Now compare that figure to the million books in the UWA collection, and I’m barely scratching the surface. It’s not even one per cent of the collection, and think of all the other good books that the uni hasn’t purchased.

I think that, before that tour group came past my desk, I had unconsciously assumed that if I worked hard enough I could someday read all the books that surrounded me. Even if I disregarded all the boring, inconsequential and esoteric books, surely I could read all the interesting books in the library. But the sums made short work of those delusions, and it made my head spin.

This story has two points:

1. Since the number of books you can read in your lifetime is very limited, you need to choose to books you read wisely. It’s useful to have some explicit criteria to help you decide if a book is worth reading. These may be geared toward any objective, but if a book isn’t going to help you achieve your objective, then it isn’t worth investing hours in reading it.

2. It is no longer possible to be a polymath. There are so many books around that it is only possible to be an expert in one small area. I assume that, back before Gutenberg, it was possible to know everything about everything. As the amount of literature grew, it became necessary to stick to one discipline: history, for example. Now it is only possible to know everything about one small area of one discipline, say, the history of fascism in Britain. It’s helpful to know what things you really want to learn about, and let that guide your reading.

And another thing, if there’s so many good books out there that you will never read them all, what are you doing reading this? I mean, thanks for visiting, but you’re wasting time. Choose your criteria, choose a book and get reading.

A whole new world

2007-08-03T19:48:00.001+08:00

I gave this short talk for the teachers at my school today. I stole most of the ideas from Byron's series on heaven and The Crowded House's course The world we all want. Check them out.

One thing that everyone agrees on is that the world could be a better place. So when it comes down to it, the goal of most writers, artists and organisations is to do one thing: diagnose a problem and suggest a solution. Of course, their solutions will vary. Plato, for instance, said that the problem was that the material world was corrupt, so his solution was to escape to the pure spiritual world. Marx said everything would be better if the means of production were held by the people. Oprah says we would all fulfill our potential if only we thought positively and A Current Affair’s general ideology is that all young people, foreign people and rich people should be named, shamed and locked away. They all diagnose a problem and tell us how to fix it. The solutions may vary, but they all agree that the world is not as it should be.

And they all pretty much agree on what’s wrong with the world – it’s full of suffering and injustice. The means by which they get there may differ, but in the end everyone hopes for a world without suffering and injustice.

Christians are no different. We recognise that the world is not as it should be, and we agree that the problem is suffering and injustice. And, like everyone else, Christianity also suggests a solution. Jesus died so that life, relationships and creation could be restored to what they should be. John gives us a snapshot of this new world in Revelation 21:1-5:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first
earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the
new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride
beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne
saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They
will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will
wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or
crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." He who was seated
on the throne said, "I am making everything new!" Then he said, Write this down,
for these words are trustworthy and true.

This passage doesn’t tell us every detail, but it does tell us some important things. Firstly, it tells us that there will be a new heaven in and new earth. This is a direct reference to Genesis 1:1 - the heavens and the earth were created by God, and one day they will be recreated by God. In this new earth there will be no tears, no death and no pain. God will dwell with his people. The present problems with world are done away with. Also notice the direction – we don’t go up to the new earth, the new earth comes down to us. John isn’t looking forward to a time when his soul will go up to heaven. He is looking forward to a time when the earth is renewed and becomes a place with no suffering or injustice.

Christ didn’t just make this new earth possible, he gave us a taste of what it will be like. I used to be confused by Jesus's miracles. All the party tricks seemed a bit unnecessary. But what Jesus was doing when he healed people was giving us a preview of a world without suffering. When he raised Lazarus from the dead he showed us a world with no death and when he turned water into wine he showed us a world where nobody has to go without. Christ’s miracles didn’t just show us who Jesus was, they showed us what he was here to do. He was here to start a process which would eliminate disease, death and hunger from the world.

So what has happened to heaven? Heaven is not actually a Biblical idea. When the Bible talks about heaven it doesn’t have clouds or robes or harps in mind. When the Bible talks about 'heaven' it almost always means the sky, and everything in it. This is the idea of 'the heavens' in Genesis 1:1. The heavens were created, and they are everything that isn’t the earth, that is, the sky. This is what the Bible writers mean when they use the word 'heaven'. Sometimes 'heaven' can also refer to the place where God lives. But this is really just a metaphor for the sky – God lives up there, not down here.

I was blown away when I first heard this. As a kid, the idea of heaven really scared me. I would feel ill when I thought about heaven because it sounded so boring. All that singing – and you had to do it forever! But a new earth, where we get to work and play games and have friends and read books and eat food, is such a great thing to look forward to.

It's an amazing future, but what does it mean for us now? Firstly, everything we do is either a contribution to the old world or the new world. The way we act is either part of the problem or part of the solution. Every time we do something to alleviate suffering or bring justice to the world we give people a glimpse of the future. When we help people in poverty, or educate these illiterate masses or just be courteous to that kid that smirks ever time you talk to them, we are, in a small way, helping to build the new earth. And maybe when they see it, they will want to be part of it, too.

And if God is going to renew the earth, we shouldn’t lose hope for the world. I think that as Christians we can sometimes cut ourselves off from the world and just take the attitude that it’s all going to hell while we are whisked away to paradise. But the world is here to stay, so every pursuit is good and valuable. It’s good to make music and cook food and lie in the sun and teach children. And it’s good to be excellent at those things. The earth is not a sinking ship. It is a good creation, waiting to be renewed.

Like a rolling stone

2007-07-28T14:56:00.000+08:00

A rolling stone gathers no moss.
- Publilius Syrus

And I saw Sisyphus in agonising torment trying to roll a huge stone to the top of a hill. He would brace himself, and push it towards the summit with both hands, but just as he was about to heave it over the crest its weight overcame him, and then down again to the plain came bounding that pitiless boulder.
- Homer

The only difference between a person and a stone rolling down a hill is that the person thinks he is in charge of his own destiny.
- Spinoza

Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.
- Camus

How does it feel To be on your own / With no direction home / Like a complete unknown / Like a rolling stone?
- Dylan

I've randomly encountered the rolling stone trope in a few different places recently. These references seem to follow some kind of logic. The rolling stone has no control over its destiny; in fact it may not have a destiny at all. It has no home, no end and no raison d'être. It simply is, subject to myriad forces. Can you think of any other references that extend this metaphor?

There is, of course, another completely separate, and somewhat contrary, tradition of a rolling stone. Undying glory goes to the person that can tell me the original quotes and any popular references.

Phil Liggett is my home-boy

2007-07-26T17:04:00.000+08:00

The Tour de France is the greatest annual sporting event in the world. It has made household names of Lance Armstrong, Stuart O’Grady and Phil Liggett, and injects hundreds of millions of dollars into the French economy each year. We in Australia are fortunate enough to have every stage of the Tour broadcast live on free-to-air TV and, due to the seven hour time difference between France and Perth, it usually airs in a very convenient evening timeslot. There are three good reasons to give up your lifestyle programmes and crime drama reruns to watch the Tour.

The third reason to watch the Tour is the excitement of team cycling. No other sport offers the tactical complexity, feats of endurance and high-speed injuries of road-racing. Because of the effect of slip-streaming, it is impossible for a cyclist to ride the tour on their own, so cyclists compete in teams. It is the team’s job to help one cyclist, their leader, to win. The fastest way to ride is in a big group, so most cyclists will ride in the peloton. But in order to win a stage, cyclists must try to break away and ride in front of the peloton, which is slower. A break-away is therefore difficult to maintain, and the peloton will usually catch up. If there is not break-away at the finish line, there will be a mad sprint to win the stage. Tactics can often be more important than endurance in the race, making for very compelling viewing.

The second reason to watch the Tour is the beautiful television production. As with most high profile sporting events, the television is produced and mixed centrally, before being broadcast around the world. The French producers handle the difficulties of televising a cycling race with aplomb. Dozens of cameramen on motorbikes follow the riders and helicopters fly overhead. The composition of the shots is always magnificent, especially those from the helicopters. We swoop down verdant valleys, skim the fields and hover over cathedrals and castles. It is worth watching the tour for the aerial vision of the French countryside alone.

The first reason to watch the Tour is to hear Phil Liggett’s brilliant commentary. Liggett has been the voice of cycling commentary in the English speaking world for over thirty years. He is an expert in his field; he has directed cycling races, edited cycling journals and was the youngest person to ever be appointed commissionaire of the Union Cycliste Internationale. He is also the best sporting commentator in the world. With boundless enthusiasm and excitement, Liggett explains the complex plays on the road in a way that is both insightful and understandable to the novitiate. Unlike most sporting commentators, he is articulate, intelligent and polysyllabic; his commentary, when transcribed, reads like prose. Hearing Liggett speak is the most enjoyable and rewarding part of watching the Tour de France.

For the first time in the history of the race, an Australian is set for a podium finish. After the disappointing crash-out of Michael Rogers and Stuart O’Grady in Stage 8, Cadel Evans remains Australia’s sole hope for victory. And with yesterday’s disqualification of Kazak team Astana and today’s news that Michael Rasmussen has been sacked from Rabobank, Evans is in a prime position to win the tour. Evans’s strength is in time trials, so Stage 19, the penultimate stage of the Tour, will decide his fortunes. Whatever the outcome, it’s sure to be compelling viewing.

Holiday amusements

2007-07-14T11:40:00.000+08:00

Since I’m working as a teacher, I get a two-week break for the school holidays. Hooray! Between sleeping and catching up with all the people I have neglected over the last term, I have been amusing myself by:

Reading:
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths
J. C. Nesfield and F. T. Wood, Manual of English Grammar and Composition
Terry Pratchett, Pyramids

Watching:
Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu)
The West Wing, season 1 (Aaron Sorkin)
The Proposition (John Hillcoat)
Le Tour de France (SBS)

Listening:
Angus & Julia Stone, Chocolates & Cigarettes
Pixies, Doolittle
The Polyphonic Spree, The Beginning Stages Of
The Philosophers’ Zone (ABC Radio National)

Playing:
Call of Duty 2 (Xbox 360)

On another note, I went op-shopping yesterday and picked up a number of very sweet items. For around fifty dollars I purchased:
- A tan corduroy jacket
- A purple velvet jacket
- A tan motorcycle-style parka with elasticised waist and wrists
- A brown leather satchel (sans strap and may not be real leather)
- A black plastic briefcase with “The Executive” written under the handle
- Two thin ties with diagonal stripes
- Two knit ties, one brown, one navy
- A brown leather belt with a large silver buckle

The velvet jacket had “2 pce. $25” written on the tag, but didn’t have a pair of trousers with it. When I took it up to the counter, the lady said I could have the jacket for ten dollars and, because the tag was incorrect, I would get five dollars off. So I got the jacket for five dollars. Bargain!

The major problem I have with clothes shopping is finding things that fit – I’m a small guy. So it was a bit of a coup getting three jackets that fit in one expedition. I was well pleased with my efforts.

Why pray?

2007-07-10T11:23:00.000+08:00

I find it very difficult to pray. I know that I should pray regularly, but I never seem to find the time. When I do get around to praying, it feels like a waste of time. Without wanting to sound pretentious, my problem with prayer is not practical; it’s intellectual. I can not work out why I need to pray to a sovereign God. If God knows everything, and is in control of everything, why do I need to ask him for things? Hasn’t God already worked out what’s going to happen? And if so, how can my requests change what God plans to do?

For example, let’s say that God is planning to make it rain tomorrow. We have organised a cricket match, so we pray for fine weather tomorrow. Does God say, “Well guys, I was planning rain, but since you asked so nicely and you’re so awesomely filled with faith, I guess I’ll have to change the plan”? And what if there’s a farmer somewhere praying just as hard for rain? Do the prayers cancel each other out? I don’t think that’s the way God works. So why pray?

Australian theologian Graeme Goldsworthy addresses this problem in his book Prayer and the Knowledge of God. Goldsworthy makes these difficulties his starting point and surveys the Bible’s view of prayer from Genesis right through to Revelation. Along the way he builds the case that prayer is not twisting the arm of the almighty, but rather relating to and working with our heavenly Father.

Firstly, Goldsworthy argues that prayer is talking to the Father like the Son talks to the Father. One of the ways we relate to each others is by talking to each other. Because God is Trinity, he is internally relational, and the Father, Son and Holy Spirit relate to each other by talking to each other. As Christians, we are united with Christ, and enjoy the same privileged access to the Father that the Son enjoys. We can talk to God just as the Christ talks to God. Prayer is therefore an expression of the relationship we have with God through Christ. This means that prayer does not originate with us. It is always a response to the self-revelation of God; we can only talk to God because he talked to us first.

But prayer is more than just talking to God. Goldsworthy goes on to argue that prayer is “thinking God’s thoughts after him”. This means that when we pray according to God’s will, we get to be involved in the unfolding of God’s sovereign plan. This is best explained using an example. We pray that our friend Mike will become a Christian and, a short while later, Mike becomes a Christian. Was this outcome a direct result of our prayer? According to Goldsworthy, the answer is both yes and no. Firstly, the answer is no; we haven’t coerced God into doing our will. God always planned that Mike would become a Christian. But in another way the answer is yes, because God also planned for us to be involved in Mike’s conversion by praying for him.

Goldsworthy would say that in praying for Mike we were “thinking God’s thoughts after him”. In other words, it was God’s will that Mike should be saved, and because God has revealed that he wants people to be saved, it also becomes our will that Mike should be saved. And so, in accordance with God’s will, we pray that Mike will become a Christian. Not only did God plan that Mike would be saved, God planned that we would take part in that process by praying. I know this sounds convoluted, and it is. Goldsworthy takes four chapters to explain it, but he cogently argues that this is the Bible’s approach to prayer.

Goldsworthy then goes on to discuss the way prayer is presented in the Bible. Through a survey of the Old and New Testaments, Goldsworthy shows that biblical prayer is always a response to and expression of God’s revealed plan for the world. In the Old Testament, prayer expresses the Israelite’s covenant relationship with God, while in the New Testament prayer responds to the revelation of Christ and looks forward to his coming kingdom. Prayer in the Bible, therefore, is an expression of God’s will; it is “thinking God’s thoughts after him”.

Through a close reading of what the Bible has to say about prayer, Goldsworthy radically reshapes the popular conception of prayer and, in so doing, solves our original problem. If prayer is “thinking God’s thoughts after him”, the action takes on a whole new meaning. Prayer ceases to be an attempt to coerce God into doing our will, but an opportunity to take part in the unfolding of his will. In Prayer and the Knowledge of God, Goldsworthy shows us that prayer is an expression of our relationship with God, a response to his revelation and an integral part of the unfolding of God’s sovereign plan. This is why we pray.

Prayer and the Knowledge of God by Graeme Goldsworthy is published by Inter-Varsity Press and retails for around twenty dollars. This post is an expanded version of a review delivered at St Matthew’s Unichurch last April. It originally appeared on the Unichurch website.

Grammatical ignorance: an update

2007-07-03T15:38:00.000+08:00

After bemaoning the lack of grammatical instruction in schools, I thought I'd better learn some grammar. So I borrowed a copy of J. C. Nesfield's Manual of English Grammar and Composition, written in 1898 and updated by F. T. Wood in 1964.

In the Manual, Nesfield and Wood take the reader sequentially through every rule in their English grammar, from number 1 (The Sentence) to number 515 (The Letter 'r' as a Vowel). Every rule is defined, explained and furnished with several pertinent examples. Along the way we encounter the eight different kinds of adjectives, the correct use of the asterisk and the continuing debate on the exact nature of the gerund. The English Masters also regale us with a survey of poetic conventions and some brief notes on the grammar of other languages relevant to English, such as Latin, Greek and Danish.

While this may sound to you like the ultimate cure for insomnia, I am finding it fascinating. I read for a couple of hours the other night, and, although I am only up to rule number 141 (Gerundive Use of Participles), I feel like a real schoolmaster. I not only know what parsing is, I think I might actually be able to do it. I am keenly awaiting my next lesson with Messrs. Nesfield and Wood, when we will discover the correct use of the fourteen punctuation marks in the English language. What fun!

Transformed by Hollywood

2007-07-01T11:59:00.000+08:00

As a child of the late 80s and early 90s, early morning cartoons hold a special place in my heart. He-man, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and, most of all, Transformers provided the mythology through which a young mind could make sense of his small world. And they were all brought together by that doyen of children’s television, Agro’s Cartoon Connection. It was worth getting up at 6 a.m. just to watch the lovely Anna-Marie Biggar feign shock at Agro’s cheeky comments.

But it was Transformers that took hold of my imagination and imprinted itself upon my psyche. The cheap 80s animation, brilliantly designed logos and boundless merchandising still warm my heart. But there were two elements that made Transformers irresistible. The first was the strong characters, the loyalty and compassion of the Autobots contrasted with the toe-curling cruelty of the Decepticons. Most of all, it was the untouchable nobility and strong leadership of Optimus Prime which held us in awe. Optimus Prime became a father figure for a depaternalised generation, winning our loyalty and respect. The second element was the mystery of the transformation. We all needed to know how they did it, and there were shelves of merchandised toys waiting to show us, offering hours of transforming wonder. To this day one of my most prized possessions in an original Optimus Prime transformer, complete with trailer and buggy. The rig transforms into Optimus, while the trailer folds out into a lab.

Now that the children of the 80s are all grown up, it was only a matter of time before the early morning cartoons were reimagined as films. TMNT was released earlier this year and now it’s the Transformers’ turn. Transformers is an all-action blockbuster aimed squarely at the 18-35 male. I haven’t seen the film, but the reviewers are saying that it follows the tried-and-try action formula, that is, a series of fast paced action sequences connected by clunky and inconsequential dialogue, with little characterisation or plot. The great strength of the film, they say, is the photorealistic computer-animated transformers. The problem is that this is not what the original Transformers was all about. The appeal of the original Transformers was the cheap animation (angles, block colour and economy of line) and the (admittedly, one-dimensional) characterisation. It wasn’t about photorealistic action. The new Transformers film is true to a boring Hollywood cliché, but not to the original series.

My top 20 novels

2007-06-28T09:36:00.002+08:00

Here are my twenty most favourite novels, listed in descending order. The selection criteria are unputdownability and the influence the work has had on my thinking. I don’t think these are the twenty greatest novels ever written, but they are the ones that I have enjoyed reading. In the interest of variety, each author appears only once on the list.

Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
Tim Winton, Cloudstreet
Albert Camus, The Outsider
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Peter Carey, Illywhacker
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
Yann Martel, Self
Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Earnest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
James Joyce, Ulysses
Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Caveats: I know that Down and Out in Paris and London is not a novel; it’s closer to journalistic narrative. But I had to include something by Orwell, and this book is by far his finest. And I know that The Old Man and the Sea and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader are too short to be novels, but I like them, so I have included them. I don’t recommend Self and Portnoy’s Complaint as light entertainment.

What do you think?

The closing circle of grammatical ignorance

2007-06-25T10:36:00.000+08:00

Since the educational progressivism of the 1960s and 70s, explicit instruction in grammar has all but disappeared from the English classroom. Forty years on, we find ourselves with a generation of journalists and teachers who were themselves never taught English grammar. Writing in the May 2006 edition of The Monthly, Clive James decries the state of English grammar in contemporary print media. Imprecise grammar begets imprecise meaning, James argues, leading to confusion and misunderstanding. Although he appeals to wide range of examples from across the print world, James heaps his most eloquent scorn on those paid to write online:

On the web itself, the standard of English is even worse than in the magazines. The characteristic sentence on the web is transmitted in a nano-second across the world and then slows to a crawl within the reader's brain, almost always because the grammar is out of whack: vocabulary is abundant, but its analytical deployment is an approximate mess. Efficiency of expression is in inverse proportion to the precision of the machines. It is sadly possible to predict a future in which anybody will be able to transmit any message at any speed but nobody will be able to say anything intelligible.

A clear and sound understanding of grammar is indispensable to the writer. Language relies on its grammar to construct meaning. Without proper grammar, communication quickly breaks down and language becomes unintelligible. Some people, usually those who are widely read, will intuit the rules. But for the majority, the dearth of explicit grammatical instruction cripples their ability to write cogently. I don't believe that languages should remain static, or that grammatical conventions are immutable. There must, however, be a widely used standard grammar if written communication is to remain precise and understandable.

I never received explicit training in English grammar. Now that I am an English teacher, I find myself able to teach only the most simple grammatical conventions. While my parent's generation knew grammar and chose not to teach it, I don't have that option; the circle of ignorance has closed. Unless these curricular deficiencies are addressed, there will soon be very few writers or teachers with a sound grasp of English grammar. Both the language and its users will be the poorer for it.

The greatest show in Oz

2007-06-22T12:34:00.000+08:00

Last month Bill Leak drew a series of cartoons for The Australian imagining a boxing match between Australian PM John Howard and Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd. As the de facto election campaign gained speed, the simple sporting metaphor lent itself brilliantly to each new punch and feint. Costello made a few appearances around budget time, Rudd’s wife Terese Rein took to her husband with a ‘Round 6’ placard and the series was fittingly concluded when Keating entered the ring to land a blow squarely on Rudd’s fine jaw. With the bespectacled Tin-Tin taking a punishing, you wouldn’t have known that Mr Howard’s government was, by its own admission, facing ‘annihilation’.But Rudd is the heavy favourite with both the crowd and the bookies, starting the match with enviable odds. While his punches at Howard’s heart (here representing 'economic management') looked slow and clumsy, Rudd has managed to land a few quick jabs and a points-scoring left hook on the PM’s infamous glass jaw (here representing 'IR' and 'climate change', respectively). His performance has not disappointed the punters, who hope that Rudd’s endurance will overcome Howard’s weight advantage.

As the action moves into the eight round, the spectators are definitely getting their money’s worth. The spotlight has swung momentarily to a tit-for-tat slap-fight between rival cheerleaders Coonan and Gillard. Some of Rudd’s more vocal and uncouth supporters have been intimidating the more salubrious Howard fans in the Gold seating. Aware that the crowd doesn’t like disturbances, Rudd’s management have escorted the trouble-makers from the premises. With neither competitor landing a knock-out blow, the fight is sure to go to the final round in November, when Referee Anthony Green will tally the judges’ points and declare a winner.

The most entertaining show in Australia this year won’t be in the theatre, the concert hall or the MCG. It will be in the ring (and Kerry O’Brien’s ring-side gesticulations). Buy your refreshments, sit on the edge of your seat and enjoy the spectacle.

David 2.0

2007-06-08T10:29:00.000+08:00

Spurred on by a number of encouraging (and possibly defamatory) comments on Facebook, I have finally got around to changing my profile pic. So after many months of the boring me, here is the new-and-improved me, which, I have to say, looks a lot more like me that the previous me.

Good question

2007-06-07T11:27:00.000+08:00

Nine-tenths of the journey to understanding is asking the right question. The hard part is working out what question to ask; the easy part is answering it.

When confronted with something puzzling, we scientific late-moderns usually ask, ‘how does it work?’ This is a legitimate question, and has proved very useful. It had given us effective medicine, stable economies and iPods. But in most situations, it is the wrong question to ask.

Last Sunday Rory preached on the Trinity at Unichurch. Understandably, many Unichurchers were asking, ‘how does it work?’ The question, of course, can’t be answered; the Trinity is a mystery. More importantly, it’s an unhelpful and inconsequential question. Paul never explained the mechanics of the Trinity because it didn’t matter. Rather, he took it as a given and explored its radical implications.

The important question to ask, therefore, is not, ‘how does it work?’ but, ‘what does it mean?’ The first question objectifies the subject and makes the questioner an arbiter of reality. The second question submits to the subject and makes the questioner a humble explorer of reality, a relating subject. Asking, ‘what does it mean?’ helps us to understand how we relate to reality, enabling us to live successfully.

What colour was Jesus?

2007-06-05T15:49:00.000+08:00

“‘Blue,’ the young priest said earnestly. ‘All available evidence, my daughter, suggests that our Lord Jesus Christ was the most beauteous, crystal shade of pale sky blue.’
“The little woman behind the wooden latticed window of the confessional fell silent for a moment. An anxious, cogitated silence. Then, ‘But how, Father? People are not blue. No people are blue in the whole big world!’
“Bewilderment of little woman, matched by perplexity of the priest … because this is not how she’s supposed to react. The bishop had said, ‘Problems with recent converts … when they ask about colour they’re almost always that … important bridges to build, my son. Remember,’ thus spake the bishop, ‘God is love; and the Hindu love god Krishna is always depicted with blue skin. Tell them blue; it will be a sort of bridge between the faiths; gently does it, you follow; and besides, blue is a neutral sort of colour, avoids the usual colour problems, you get away from black and white: yes, on the whole I’m sure it’s the one to choose.’ Even bishops can be wrong, the young father is thinking, but meanwhile he’s in quite a spot because the little woman is clearly getting into a state, has begun issuing a severe reprimand through the wooden grille…” - Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, pp. 103-104

I have been reading a bit about the inculturation of the gospel recently and this comical episode came to mind. While it is an important process, retelling the gospel in the language of another culture is also fraught with difficulties, especially if, like the bishop, it is done simplistically or arbitrarily. I’m planning to post more fully on this topic in the near future as a continuation of my ill-informed thoughts on linguistics and the Bible, "There’s no such thing as literality".

There is no such thing as literality (part 2)

2007-05-30T11:08:00.000+08:00

In a previous post, I argued that there is no such thing as literal meaning, because language is by nature metaphorical. This does not mean that I deny the existence of meaning, or even the possibility of a ‘correct’ meaning. Rather, meaning is not self-evident. Because the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, the relationship must be discerned based on context. This process is interpretation. One interpretation of a text may be better than another, not because it is self-evidently so, but because it is backed up by a better argument.

I think there could be, however, something close to literal meaning. When we say we mean something ‘literally’, others usually understand what we mean. The meaning we call ‘literal’ is simply the meaning that is most often associated with a word or phrase. We could call this the ‘usual’ meaning of a word. If we think again of the ‘cloud of meaning’ that surround a word (see this post), the natural meaning can be thought of as the precise meaning at the centre of that cloud. The fact that one sense of a word is used more often that another does not, however, privilege that sense over all others. More importantly, it does not guarantee that every use of a word refers to its ‘usual’ meaning.

To take the example of the word ‘apple’ again, when I say this word you probably think of something like the fruit pictured. So this is the ‘usual’ meaning of the word. But there is no guarantee that I am referring to that meaning. I could be referring the Big Apple, or the apple of my eye, or my Adam’s apple, or my computer, or Paltrow/Martin offspring. The meaning is determined by context.

Even though the ‘usual’ meaning of ‘apple’ is understood, it does not mean that there exists an interpretation of the word that is more correct than others. What we call literal meaning is simply that sense of a word that is most often used. The burden of argument is not lifted by the ‘usual’ meaning. This is especially true for the Bible. As ancient documents, it is temporally, generically and culturally removed from our milieu. We should never assume that the ancient writer’s use of a word matches the ‘usual’ meaning we assign it. We need to work hard to interpret the scripture and understand its intended meaning.

White curves

2007-05-29T16:38:00.000+08:00

The architecture of Santiago Calatrava is nothing if not arresting. Looking as if they were formed from the body parts of various animals, his creations seem impossibly balanced and proportioned: they simply shouldn’t stand up. But they do, and they are beautiful. Outside they are ostentatiously white and curvaceous; inside they are vaulting halls and geometrical exactness. His various train stations, opera halls and museums are celebrated from Madrid to Milwaukee.

As with anything new, Calatrava’s work has become a point of debate. Are his buildings important and beautiful steps forward in architecture or kitschy curiosities, dripping with engineering sleight-of-hand? Are they a tribute the architect’s aesthetic or his arrogance? Perhaps both, but that judgement is for future generations to make. Here are some nice pictures of the Milwaukee Art Museum, courtesy of The New No. 2.

Politics and the Kingdom

2007-05-24T16:32:00.000+08:00

While I am far from Marxist, the work of Louis Althusser has become something of a guiding light to me. Althusser basically argues that each person is an ideological subject, that is, we view the world through an ideological framework. This framework, he argues, is culturally and socially determined; we don’t really influence our own ideology. The important corollary is that everything a person or organisation thinks and does is political. In other words, every action is designed to shift power from one place to another, whether the actor is conscious of it or not. Predicably, actions usually shift power to the actor. This means that when we read a text an important critical question is: who benefits? Who gains power and who looses power as a result of this text?

So how does this apply to the gospel? How does the message of Christ shift power? When we think about it in these terms, the gospel is obviously different. It benefits everyone and everything. At the same time, the gospel emphasises humility and service. It seems to dramatically break down the power plays that characterise all other relations.

It seems that the gospel is either the one message that breaks all power plays, or it is the greatest power play of them all. The gospel undermines all selfish and unjust actions, proving them to be futile. It makes power shifts useless. On the other hand, the gospel shifts all power into the hands of Christ; he becomes the ruler of everything. I suppose these two thoughts are interdependent. Because Christ has seized all power, our paltry bids to seize power become futile. All that is left for us to do is surrender to the rule of Christ.

There is no such thing as literality

2007-05-21T14:51:00.000+08:00

There is no such thing as literal meaning. Words are never analogous to their meaning; rather they are signs that represent a meaning. Words (and, by extension, phrases, sentences, texts) are metaphors. So the word ‘apple’ is not itself an apple, but a metaphor that represents to idea of ‘apple’ that we carry around in our heads. If my idea of ‘apple’ is similar enough to your idea of ‘apple’, the word has meaning and we can communicate. We may even come across something that matches both of our ideas of ‘apple’, and therefore call it an apple.

Words are ascribed meanings arbitrarily, by consensus among their users. Meanings are not sharply defined, but fuzzy; a word is surrounded by a cloud of possible meanings. A particular use of a word refers to a particular point in its cloud. An especially influential use of a word may add to or alter the shape of its cloud. When we read a text, the meaning of each word is determined by context. That is, we decide which point in the meaning-cloud is referenced by understanding the word’s interaction with the words, traditions and cultures that surround it.

This semantic fuzziness means that a text cannot have a literal meaning. A ‘literal’ meaning does not exist because no point in the meaning-cloud can be privileged above the others. When someone attributes a ‘literal’ meaning to a text, they are simply privileging their interpretation of the text above all other possible interpretations. They are giving their interpretation an absolute authority it does not deserve. Literality is a crude political device.

This, of course, has implications for biblical interpretation. In some traditions, ‘literal interpretation’ of the Bible is used as the sole criterion of orthodoxy. This principle is used to bludgeon any view that differs from the dominant view, regardless of its hermeneutical validity. Those that play the literality card assume it trumps all arguments. It is used in place of scholarship to undergird all manner of dubious theology and specious doctrines.

So I am sceptical of anyone that says they read the Bible literally. Whether they know it or not, they are dodging their responsibility to argue for the validity of their interpretation. They are lending their interpretation authority it has not earned. Because there is no such thing as literality.

The language-shaping power of Page Rank

2007-05-16T11:07:00.000+08:00

I think I’ve found a new use for Google search: as a dictionary.

Searching a word using Google can tell you whether you have spelt it correctly, as the search engine will show you how many times it finds that word used on the internet. A word spelt incorrectly may be found a hundred times, whereas a word spelt correctly may be found a million times. I realised this recently when someone searched for ‘Weltangschauung’ and Google spat out this post. As it’s highly unlikely that The Black Square has the internet’s most popular discussion of worldview, I realised that I must have spelt the term incorrectly. Sure enough, ‘Weltanschauung’ registers two million hits, as opposed to one hundred for ‘Weltangschauung’. The post has been corrected.

By finding all the uses of a certain word or phrase on the internet, Google acts like a dictionary. Because meaning is arbitrarily assigned to words, a dictionary entry is based upon consensus of all the past uses of a word. Like Google, a dictionary will give precedence to the most popular or influential uses of a word. When the OED was created, the great task was to compile a record of the most influential uses of each word in the language. It took many years. Google can perform much the same task in a fraction of a second. “249,000,000 results for Weltangschauung in 0.17 seconds,” it informs me at the top of the page. If I want to know what the term means, I need only peruse the first few examples found.

Of course, this is more work than simply flicking through the Concise Oxford. But in some instances, is has the potential to yield more reliable results. Instead of taking the dictionary’s word for it, Google directly shows how the word is being used today and which uses are most influential. While the meanings of most words may not have dramatically changed since your Concise Oxford was printed, Google may prove a better bet when exploring technical terms or dialectical parlance.

While it attempted to describe the language, the OED ultimately shaped it. Like Shakespeare and the KJV, it standardised the use of English, defining the parameters within which it was acceptable to speak and write. Now that Google is the medium through which so many English speakers interact with the language, will it become another such force? Will the vagaries of the Page Rank system define what language is appropriate?

Melburnian Macbeth: a review

2007-05-14T09:53:00.000+08:00

Since Kenneth Branagh popularised the genre in the late 80s and early 90s, film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays have been staple fare in the cinema. These films and the blockbusters to follow, such as Luhrmann’s pop-culture referencing Romeo + Juliet and Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream have trod a wide path through Hollywood. Nothing since The Globe has done more to introduce Shakespeare into the public imagination. Undergrad classes in Shakespeare are bulging, some of which use these films as their primary texts.

Now Australia has produced a contribution to the genre. Geoffrey Wright’s Macbeth, released in cinemas late last year, translates the Scottish play to a stylised Melbourne gangland. Duncan becomes a kind of Australian godfather, Macbeth, Banquo and Macduff his cronies and Dunsinane an eastern suburbs mansion. While in many respects unoriginal, this film is a visually beautiful and an entertaining adaptation of a familiar story.

The film starts with a deal gone wrong between Duncan’s men, lead by Macbeth, and a Vietnamese gang. When they meet in a multi-level car-park, Macbeth correctly reads the Asians’ edginess, and draws first. Carnage ensues and the treacherous Cawdor taken hostage. News of Macbeth’s work reaches Duncan, he proclaims Macbeth Thane of Cawdor, and the story proceeds from there.

Macbeth’s strength is not in its reworking of the play, nor in its stylisation of the contemporary setting. The film situates itself firmly in the stream of films like Almereyda’s Hamlet and Supple’s Twelfth Night, both of which translate their scripts into contemporary urban settings. While Macbeth does this convincingly, it doesn’t offer any new insights into the play’s potential. To its credit, Macbeth does avoid the inanity of calling guns ‘swords’ and cars ‘horses’ into which Romeo + Juliet fell, but it is sometimes difficult to remember that these are criminals rather than kings.

Visually, however, the film seems heavily influenced by Luhrmann, especially in the overtly kitsch interiors, warm lighting, and breadth of sartorial references. Unlike Romeo + Juliet, however, the film still manages to remain understated in the way of films produced outside Hollywood. This is where Macbeth comes into its own: the film is visually stunning and beautifully edited. Production designer David McKay has created a world that is at once recognisably Australian and other-worldly.

As with many Australian films, the limited pool of available actors is evidenced in a range of familiar faces, some of which seem a little uncomfortable with the material. The performances are convincing, however. Victoria Hill’s highly sexualised Lady Macbeth is brilliant, as she subtly manipulates Macbeth while remaining exceedingly feminine. While not a new idea (Polanski’s Lady Macbeth was also sexually dominant) Hill portrays her very attractively. The witches, however, are unnecessarily sexualised, imagined as flirtatious schoolgirls that seduce Macbeth with their portents and their bodies simultaneously. No self-consciously arty film would be without some gratuitous nudity, I suppose.

Macbeth is the best-produced Australian film since 2005’s The Proposition. For this reason alone it is worth seeing. It is also fast-paced, visually stunning, intelligent and very entertaining. It seems that, moribund though it its, the Australian film industry is capable of occasionally throwing up something genuinely remarkable.

Wikipedia in the classroom

2007-05-07T10:29:00.000+08:00

Two or three years ago, the acceptability of Wikipedia in formal education was being hotly debated. Back then I was studying history full-time as an undergrad. Most students and almost all academics I knew were strongly against it, and many rejected it out of hand. They were right that Wikipedia has no place as a source, but that doesn’t mean that the site isn’t useful. It was never acceptable to cite Britannica as a source, either.

Now I’m a high school teacher, and I accept Wikipedia as a valid source in my classroom. Many of the arguments against the online encyclopaedia’s efficacy simply don’t hold water. Except in the most esoteric of areas, Wikipedia is at least as authoritative as any other general reference work, owing mainly to its self-moderating nature. Articles on common topics have so many editors and readers that errors are very quickly corrected. Scurrilous edits are identified and removed by administrators within minutes.

The greatest strength of Wikipedia is its breadth, both horizontally and vertically. Print sources will never be able to keep abreast of technical advances, for example. More importantly, an article in Wikipedia can represent a broad range of perspectives on a single topic, because it has multiple authors.

This doesn’t mean that students aren’t expected to read further. As with any encyclopaedia, Wikipedia should be used as a starting point for research rather than an end point. The site should direct you toward more authoritative sources, which may then be cited.

Controversy over Wikipedia will die as the efficacy of the medium becomes clearer and users form a consensus on its appropriate use. Whatever the conclusion, as one of the top ten most popular sites in the world, Wikipedia will heavily influence the delivery of education and information in coming decades.

This post was inspired by a lecture delivered by Wikipedia founder Jim Wales in Sydney last week and broadcast on ABC Radio National yesterday. You can listen here, including ten questions from The Chaser.

Dawkins' delusion

2007-05-03T12:07:00.000+08:00

Over the past few months people everywhere have knotted their underwear over Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. The book has induced a reaction of almost Da Vincian proportions. This week’s Koorong catalogue advertised two books, one by Alister McGrath, directly countering Dawkins’ bestseller. This must be the last blog to comment on it. Evangelicals seem to be treating it as the heaviest battering ram at their gate.

But while we have been lobbing grenades over the walls, the critics have called Dawkins’ bluff. Terry Eagleton, writing in the LRB, was one of the first to call, wittily berating Dawkins for his theological illiteracy:

Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.

Lesser critics understood, too. On ABC TV’s Book Club, the politically broad panel agreed unanimously that Dawkins is nothing more than a “fundamentalist atheist”. The London Telegraph agreed last week, equating Dawkins’ attitude with that of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

The Crucifixion and the Resurrection are just as distasteful for Richard Dawkins as for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, because they subvert the idea that man is at his greatest when he is most strong, masterful and clever.

Derision and ridicule seem to be the general reaction to The God Delusion. While the book may still prove to be influential, at least in the short term, it looks like we needn’t scramble to man the battlements. As with The Da Vinci Code, people aren't that easily deluded.

The king is dead

2007-05-02T15:38:00.000+08:00

Henry Ford wouldn't survive in the world of Ebay

I love podcasts. I would like to say that this is because I enjoy keeping my finger on the cultural intellectual pulse of the globe. But really I love them because they are free and require no effort. They also give me something to do when I’m driving.

One of the podcasts I subscribe to is By Design, a programme on ABC Radio National. On last week’s show, presenter Alan Saunders discussed ‘inventing the future’ with prominent designer Jonathan Sands. To illustrate the way in which he believed the internet will shape the future, Sands described how the car had dramatically changed the American landscape.

In the 1900s, Sands said, small-town economies thrived in the west and south of the US. In any given town you could buy just about any product. The next town with a similar range of goods would be thirteen miles away; the distance a horse and cart could make a round trip in a day.

Then the car was invented. People and goods could be transported from coast to coast in days. Within a few years huge numbers of these small towns died. The bottom line was that the car transformed America from thousands of economies with a few hundred participants each to only a few economies with millions of participants each. (Perth is a prime example of the car’s economy-shaping power. That’s why I need podcasts when I drive.)

The internet, Sands argues, will do the opposite. Whereas a good or service was once supplied by a few large corporations (e.g., Sony, Universal and EMI in the music industry), the internet has made it possible for anyone to trade. Ebay has launched countless small businesses with very small turnovers and no overheads. Rather than choose from the narrow range offered by the corporations, consumer s can buy exactly what they want from anyone in the world. Large economies therefore fracture into billions of highly specialised pieces, each with only a few participants.

This structural shift will be, Sands argues, even more dramatic that precipitated by the car. Hopefully it will empower the individual, not just cyber-tsars like Google and Ebay. What's certain is that Henry Ford's (pictured) business model is as outdated as his car.

Is there a Christian worldview? (part 2)

2007-03-21T15:33:00.000+09:00

As a part of the induction into my new teaching job, I had to complete a tertiary unit on the idea of Christian worldview and its application to curriculum. It is clear, we were told, that there is a Christian worldview. Therefore, we should develop curriculum that is consistent with this worldview. Most of the course was focussed on the practical implications of this idea; the existence of the Christian worldview was assumed and therefore went unchallenged.

But it seems to me that there cannot be any such worldview. Even if we accept that there is such a thing as Weltanschauung, and that belief systems can be consistent and knowable, how could one ever articulate a Weltanschauung that is essentially Christian? It seems to me that one’s worldview includes ones political, economic and cultural assumptions. But what doe the gospel have to say about any of these areas? Very little, if anything. How can the gospel tell you whether the free market or protectionism is the way to go? What does it have to say about the efficacy of the scientific project? Can it tell us whether the state is ruled by the people or the people by the state?

The gospel is at once far bigger and far smaller than any one worldview. It is broad and elastic enough to encompass democracy and monarchy, romanticism and rationalism. But at the same time it also makes some very specific claims. As missionaries have found, however, these claims are compatible with a far wider range of cultures than was once thought. The gospel is incredibly broad in its narrowness.

So what of my school's model of inherently Christian education? Unfortunately, it is left without a foundation. I think most of the teachers understand this without necessarily questioning the validity of a Christian worldview. How are we to present maths in a way that is inherently Christian? they rightly ask. How can one reading of a text be essentially Christian while another is not? In the end, the gospel is broad enough to accommodate a great range of readings, not to mention maths. As a Christian, we are free to study and enjoy all the good things people have thought and said.

Is there a Christian worldview? (part 1)

2007-03-19T17:52:00.000+09:00

At the moment I’m teaching at a Christian high school on the eastern outskirts of Perth. It’s interesting to watch how this school constructs its identity as ‘Christian’. I mean, how can a school be inherently or even naturally ‘Christian’?

The nature of the Christian school usually finds its meaning in a conception of “Christian education”. As far as I can tell, Christian education seems to be modelled in three distinct ways:

Education for Christians: This is the siege model of Christian education. Schools of this model will preferentially accept Christian students or students with Christian parents. Like most Christian schools, these schools are likely to be ‘parent controlled’, that is, they are run democratically by a group of interested Christian parents. The purpose of this model is to protect children from unacceptable aspects of wider culture.

Education by Christians: This is the evangelistic model of Christian education. School of this model will preferentially accept students from non-Christian backgrounds. They are more likely to be run by church or denominational groups than parents. The purpose of this model is proselytisation.

Education that is inherently Christian: This is the curricular model of Christian education. It does not aim to cater to a certain category of students, but rather aims to develop curriculum and educational practices that are inherently Christian. This is justified by an appeal to a Christian worldview. Curriculum is thus developed from the perspective of this worldview. The purpose of this model isn’t clear to me, although it seems to be more experimental than practical.

The school I work at happens to be at the forefront of the development of this third construction of Christian education. But I think there are major flaws in their concept of the Christian worldview. I'll discuss these problems in the second part of this post.

Bible quiz humiliation

2007-02-13T11:24:00.000+09:00

As a bit of recess-time entertainment (I'm teaching now), I took Alistair's Bible trivia quiz. The quiz is absolutely crazy! I think I did OK on the NT questions, but majority of questions were based on the OT, and do you think I can remember whether Bazukariah was a Dolomite or a Farenhite? Have a go if you have a few minutes ... hopefully you won't be as humiliated as I was. I need to get reading...

You rank 35% on the biblical comprehension scale.

You obviously have a respectable level of biblical knowledge. However, you fall just a little short of the standard of this advanced biblical comprehension test. Perhaps a more focused Bible-reading plan would improve your biblical knowledge.

How Well Do You Know Your Bible?
Quizzes for MySpace

The facts behind "The Helsinki Roccamatios"

2007-01-09T17:21:00.000+09:00

“The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios” is one of the most beautiful stories I have ever read. The first and longest in a collection of short stories by Yann Martel, the story was originally published in Canada in 1993 after winning the Journey Prize in 1991. Although it impressed critics, the book failed to sell and received little attention until Martel won the Booker in 2002 for his second novel, Life of Pi. In the space of around one hundred pages, the story manages to explore grief, illness, friendship, history, sexuality, storytelling, love, death and the nature of humanity, all in an intensely moving way.

“The Helsinki Roccamatios” tells of two young men that become friends at college. When one of the friends contracts AIDS, the other goes to visit him at his family home and ends up caring for him throughout his illness. In order to fill the long, bed-ridden hours, the friends invent a game. They agree that each day one will compose and recount a story to the other about a fictional family from Helsinki, the Roccamatios. The Roccamatios are Italians with a large extended family and important business interests across Europe. To make the game more interesting, the travails of the Roccamatios in each successive story must parallel a notable event from each consecutive year of the twentieth century, the first story paralleling an historical event in 1901, the second story an event in 1902, and so on. As the narrative progresses, then, so does the story of the Roccamatios, a story within a story that becomes more interesting as the men hone their storytelling skills. The friends continue the game until the game reaches 1986, when the AIDS patient finally dies.

While the friendship between the men as they suffer is beautifully portrayed, the most interesting thing about the story is the interplay between the two narratives, between the story of the friends and the story of the Roccamatios. As the narratives unfold, the Roccamatio game becomes more than a distraction; it becomes a commentary on history, humanity and, most specifically, the friends’ own situation. Through the stories they tell, the friends reveal their assumptions, prejudices, philosophies and feelings to each other. It emerges that the character with AIDS has a much more pessimistic view of humanity that the other. As the illness develops and his emotional state declines, this character chooses more and more tragic events around which to base his stories. The other man, trying to compensate and lift his friend’s spirits, chooses increasingly happy historical events. This building oscillation between comedy and tragedy thus becomes a narrative debate on the state of humanity and the meaning of history. Is humanity good or evil? Is history progress or destruction? The debate is never finalised; the evil illness destroys their good friendship before they complete the history of the Roccamatios. But some hope is salvaged. The remaining friend completes the story, but does not tell us how it ends, as his friend had asked that the game remain private.

Martel tells this story in his noticeably sparse and direct prose, a style reminiscent of Camus or Ondaatje, but with palpable warmth and sympathy. He is careful that his political assumptions remain secondary to the characters and their relationship, while unflinchingly exploring a plethora of themes. It is this combination of elements that makes him such a formidable and compelling storyteller. After reading Life of Pi and Self, his first novel, I think “The Helsinki Roccamatios” is Martel’s finest work. The story is intellectually stimulating, politically informed and so aesthetically and emotionally beautiful that it made me cry. It has influenced the way I think about friendship and love, grief and death. It is storytelling at its best.

Sucked in to the MySpace black hole

2007-01-08T11:56:00.000+09:00

I have finally been sucked in to the black hole of time wastage that is MySpace. You can check out my suitably pimped profile here, including some very funky wallpaper by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. You can also check out my slightly disturbing results from the 'Which super-hero are you?' quiz. There is a link under the results if you would like to have a go yourself.

Christmas and I have made our peace

2006-12-22T17:52:00.000+09:00

Ahh, it’s that time of year again. That time when taste is out and tackiness is in, when subtlety is replaced by sentimentality and moderation by mince pies.* 'Tis the season for peak consumer confidence, celebrity endorsed merchandise and themed television specials. And it’s the time of year when Christians get to indulge in a good old whinge about degenerate society, high-jacked festivals and ‘eksmas’,** while everyone else wishes Santa a happy birthday. Yes, it’s Christmas.

But Christmas and I have made our peace. After a few years of cold war and self-righteous angst, I am again ready to celebrate the nativity and participate in its loosely associated rituals. Last year I worked full-time in a shopping centre over the Christmas break and witnessed, perhaps for the first time, the emotional and financial toll the pressure the consume at Christmas exacts on people. This year I have managed to avoid that depressing spectacle. Inspired by these posts, I’ve also taken a fresh look at the nativity story, without the soft glow. And I’ve discovered the most wonderful story. It’s the place where myth breaks into history and changes everything. The king has come, the warrior born, the god descended. Emmanuel, God with us! It’s triumphant and beautiful and poetic. This is certainly worth celebrating, regardless of how sickening much of the surrounding paraphernalia can be. This year I plan to take Edmund’s advice and, as far as I can, stand quietly by.

Have a wonderful Christmas!

*Yes, this is scraping the bottom of the alliteration barrel. Perhaps 'muzak' is a better alternative.
**I love the misunderstanding about 'Xmas'. Every year I hear at least one Christian leader rail against the removal of 'Christ' from "eksmas", oblivious the presence of the letter chi.

Red frogs in Dunsborough

2006-11-28T14:34:00.000+08:00

For the last week I have been in Dunsborough (south-west WA) with Leavers' Chaplaincy, better known as Red Frogs. LC is the WA arm of the Queensland based Hotel Chaplaincy and ministers to leavers (aka schoolies if you're on the east coast) in a number of locations around Dunsborough, Rottnest Island, Margaret River and Hamlin Bay. The idea of LC is to support the leavers in any way they need and to do some evangelism if the opportunity arises.

In Dunsborough we had teams based at all the major accommodation providers, as well as teams on the street. I was based in the Lakes caraven park, which accommodated around 900 of the 5000 leavers in Dunsborough. The group is called Red Frogs because our 'calling card' is an Allen's Red Frog jelly. Offering the leavers lollies is a really effective way of starting a conversation and promoting the chapliancy. In the mornings we cooked pancakes for the leavers and sausage sizzles on some evenings. Out main work, however, took place between 7pm and 2am when the prties were in full swing. We chatted with the leavers in the street or in their accommodation as well as helping those with medical or emotional problem. Because the leavers are relaxed, bored and usually lubricated with a few drinks, they are really open to conversations about anything, including God and religion. This means that, although the chaplaincy work is mainly physical help, it can also be a powerful evangelistic tool.

Leavers week officially ends tomorrow, and chaplains will be in the locations until Friday. Please pray that God will use their work and that the leavers will recieve their message.

Is Scripture true?

2006-11-20T14:49:00.000+08:00

Etymologically, ‘true’ means something closer to ‘honest’, ‘loyal’ or ‘trustworthy’ than ‘propositionally correct’. In fact, this latter meaning only came into common usage late in the seventeenth century. Be this as it may, ‘true’ now primarily means ‘propositionally correct’; the former meaning is only listed fifth out of eleven definitions in the Concise OED. Unfortunately, these two meaning share very little semantic ground. The former, older, meaning would primarily be applied to a person (‘she is true’), while the latter, newer, meaning is applied to a proposition (‘it is true’). It seems to me that the semantic link is the word’s application to speech. The true (honest, trustworthy) person’s word could, by extension, be described as true. Therefore, when the true person utters a proposition, that proposition is true. But there is a big difference between the meaning of ‘true’ here and our newer meaning. The implicit assumption of the newer meaning is that a true proposition is inherently true; it draws its authority not from the speaker but from its own inherent nature of immutable trueness.

This distinction has implications for the way we think about Scripture. When, in John 17:17, Christ says to his Father, “your word is truth,” what does he mean? I have no knowledge of NT Greek, but it is clear that truth here is linked to the speech of a person (“your word” rather than “the word”). The authority and trustworthiness of the word is not derived from the nature of the word itself, but from the authority and trustworthiness of the speaker. Assuming that the Scripture is God’s word, it is trustworthy not because it is inherently true (a category always defined by the hearer), but because God himself is true.

This doesn’t seem to be the way many Christians view Scripture. Rather than a completely trustworthy communication of a God who speaks, Scripture seems to be more often viewed as a compendium of inherently correct propositions. This view can easily lend itself to an attitude toward Scripture that questions the need for interpretation and rigorous scholarship in order to understand the text. This attitude can leads to obscurantism (both within the text and without), wild theological speculation and viewing Scripture a some kind of magical text, set apart from, and therefore not subject to the same rules as, every other text. In extreme cases it can even lead to the deification (and, dare I say, idolisation) of the text. This seems to happen when the Scripture is worshipped for its magical power to give an answer to every question, like some kind of divine eight-ball.

I suppose the distinctive view of Scripture for which I am arguing really amounts to a certain hermeneutic, one that values contextualisation, literary critique and biblical theology. But it also has more pedestrian implications. It means that, when we read Scripture, we should read it like we read any other book, using the same rules and asking the same questions to work out what it is saying. As with any text, we will understand some of it, but not all of it, and the more we read, the more we will understand. On the other hand, it means that we should remember the person behind the text and his trustworthiness so that when the Scripture does say something, we can trust it. Scripture won’t give us the answers to all our questions, or even any of our questions, but it will give us a glimpse of who God is and what is has done.

Dave gets a makeover

2006-11-16T10:42:00.000+08:00

(and starts to refer to himself in the third person.)

In case you were confused by the picture that used to be on my profile, that wasn't me.
This is me! -->
I finally got my act together and posted a real photo of myelf. Feast your eyes on it ... ok, that enough feasting, back to work now. You shouldn't be reading blogs on company time anyway. Shame on you!

Stanley Fish critiques liberal 'tolerance'

2006-11-13T16:47:00.000+08:00

Writing on 'The Trouble With Tolerance' in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week, Stanley Fish argues that the liberal ideal of 'tolerance' is in fact the antithesis of true tolerance, beacuse it tolerates only those views that subordinate their conclusions to the overarching values of liberalism. If a view is not in the best interest of liberal society (as defined by liberalism) then it is not to be tolerated (a la fascism or fundamentalist Islam). Contrary to its obstensible mission, liberal tolerance works not to include diverse views but to exclude all viewpoints that do not reinforce its parent ideology.

Fish is reviewing the book Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire by Wendy Brown. Brown starts with this critique of liberal tolerance and goes on to argue that this irony actually sharpens difference rather than dulling it, and that the language of tolerance is used by liberal nations not to protect but to bully and oppress their non-liberal citizens. Fish finds Brown's critique of liberal tolerance persuading, but points out that while she highlights the problem, she offers no alternative or solution.

If you are reading this, then you are probably already well aquainted with this critique; I first encountered it in Don Carson's The Gagging of God. It's encouraging to see the same critique popping up in a mainstream journal. The review is well worth a read.

When the only Big Idea is rationalism

2006-11-10T21:19:00.000+08:00

I was listening to the ABC Radio National programme Big Ideas a few days ago and the host, Terry Lane, made a comment that really surprised me. The topic of the programme was the history and politics of the 'troubles' in Northern Ireland and one of the guests was Adrian Little, a professor in politics at Melbourne Uni and an expert on these events. After discussing the events and the causes behind the them, Terry Lane turned to conversation to the popular reaction which, as we know, was, and still is, religiously partisan. When Little's explained that passions still run high in Northern Ireland, Lane responded with this question:

As education levels rise on both sides of the border, you would expect people to become more secular and more rational in their assessments. Does that not happen?

The assumptions and attitudes implicit in this comment are astounding, especially when it comes from the host of a public radio programme that purports to explore 'ideas'. In what sounded like a slightly exasperated tone, Little responded admirably:

Well, the education system still has a considerable religious input. Therefore I don't think it's a matter of the secular and the rational emerging. What we get in Northern Ireland are competing rationalities, rather than being one secular rationality. So I don't think the likelihood being sidelined and giving way to secularism is likely to occur. But in Northern Ireland I think there is an awareness of the competition of rationalities. That's what people have lived all of their lives. so the push towards secular rationalism doesn't quite have the impact that it might have in other parts of the world.

It's increasingly rare to hear such faith in the power of secularism and universal rationality. Terry Lane's condecending tone towards the inhabitants of Northern Ireland just shows the rigidity and arrogance of his own understanding. I would expect better from Radio National.

Post-prac consumption

2006-11-09T13:07:00.000+08:00

Last Friday was my last day of teaching prac ever! Hurrah! This means that, although I still have a couple of weeks of classes and two (rather large) assignments to submit, I have virtually finished my degree. Prac tends to eat your life, so I've found myself with much more free time over the last few days. Consequently, I have been:

Reading:
Peter Jensen, The Revelation of God
Jeanette Winterson, Weight
Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology
Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

Watching:
The Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach)
Oliver Twist (Roman Polanski)

Listening to:
Ben Folds, Songs for Silverman
Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere
Something for Kate, Phantom Limbs

Playing:
Dead Rising (XBox 360)

I'm also looking forward to reading The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith by Peter Carey. Carey is one of my favourite novelists; I think this will be the fifth Carey novel I have read and they have all been marvelous. It's sitting on my shelf calling out to be read but I want to finish some other books first. The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie is also waiting next to it. I can't wait to finish uni and get into summer!

Simple categories

2006-11-03T11:44:00.000+08:00

I caught a few minutes of that most malign of TV shows last night, A Current Affair, and was reminded of the way we make sense of the world. It seems to me that people make sense of the world by categorising it, by breaking it up into pieces that can be filed away under the appropriate heading. By their nature, categories exist in duality; we could not conceive of black if we did not have a conception of white. So we think about the world through duality.

Now in A Current Affair land, everyone and everything exist on one side of the good/evil duality, and the show leaves the viewer in no doubt as to which is applicable to the agent in question. A Current Affair stands between the villains and their victims, dealing out super-sized serves of justice. This simple duality, and its supporting narrative, is attractive to the audience because it efficiently makes sense of reality. Everything is good or evil. We are good and we fight against evil. Simple.

Of course, reality does not simply conform to this duality, or any duality, but is mysterious and uncertain. It is a continuous landscape rather than a stack of discrete drawers. To map this landscape, we divide it up and file it away in drawers. No one can completely and accurately map the landscape, so we all utilise these the drawers. But by multiplying the categories we can approximate the continuous through the discrete (like some sort of epistemological calculus!). Therefore, all intellectual pursuits aim to multiply categories by pushing at their edges and breaking existing categories apart. This, of course, only results in more categories, but hopefully categories that closer approximate reality.

Three implications come to mind. The first is that, while we may scoff at the simplistic (and ultimately dangerous) world-view of A Current Affair, no one is able to accurately map reality, and therefore no one has the absolute answer to a question. One may utilise more categories and more dualities, and therefore better approximate reality, but categories they remain, and are therefore inaccurate. The second implication comes out of the first and is that dualities are only convenient constructs and are never really real. There always remains some wriggle space in between. Thirdly, categories and dualities are powerful devices. If you can convince someone of the reality of certain dualities, you can convince them of your conception of reality.

The irony of this post is, of course, that I have set up categories and dualities to make my point. I have contrasted the ‘continuous landscape’ with the ‘discrete drawers’ and I have contrasted ‘reality’ with ‘conception’. These are just categories, convenient constructs, and are therefore open to contestation. But it does go to show that we always think in categories.

The ethics of abortion: are we asking the wrong question?

2006-11-01T10:26:00.000+08:00

I have recently been thinking about the ethical arguments that surround the issue of abortion. It seems to me that these arguments and their conclusions are not as black-and-white as their proponents may have us believe.

There are some things that are clearly agreed upon by both sides of the abortion debate. Firstly, that all human life is sacred, even though the definition of such life may vary. (It is worth asking what is meant by such an overtly religious word as ‘sacred’, but for the moment let’s assume its natural meaning of ‘set apart’, that is, set apart from the rest of the created/natural order.) Whatever the semantic connotations, the implication is that it is wrong to violate human life. Secondly, it is agreed that at some point in its development human life in potentia becomes human life proper. Potential human life is not accorded the same sanctity as human life proper and therefore it is not wrong to violate potential human life.

What is not agreed is the point at which this transition takes place. Those that argue against all abortion, especially evangelical Americans, place this point at conception, thus placing the embryo, however undeveloped, in the ‘human life’ category. On the other end of the spectrum, hard-line abortionists may place the transitional point at birth, while less radical proponents of abortion may define an embryo or foetus as ‘human life’ at anywhere between 10 and 25 weeks into its development. And then there is the Vatican, which defines even human life in potentia as sacred, and therefore bans contraception.

My difficulty is that the placement of each of these points seems rather arbitrary. Potential human life becomes human life proper at any point from the creation of the unfertilised egg to full-term birth. Of course we may ask which of these points is the correct point or the right point, but it seems to me that there is no clear answer to this question. What makes a zygote fundamentally human? And how is it different with two cells or eight or sixteen, at four weeks or at fourteen?

Evangelicals rightly refer to the scriptures for moral guidance. On this issue, however, the Bible is, not surprisingly, silent, as it was written at a time when early-term abortion was not possible. Many evangelical anti-abortionists cite Psalm 139:13, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.” Without harping on the dangers of proof-texting, this verse is part of a psalm that celebrates God’s intimate knowledge of the writer, not a scientific treatise on the nature of the foetus. A more rigorous doctrinal argument may be made concerning the nature of man, but again, this may not yield the position of the sought-for transitional point.

Perhaps we are asking the wrong question. Perhaps instead of asking at what point human life starts, so that we may violate it with indemnity, we should be celebrating all God’s creation and our simultaneously exalted and dependant nature before him. The Bible, by its very nature, is not going to answer our questions about embryonic development, but it does tell us something about who we are. This, of course, does not add much to the abortion debate; we still need to choose whether to use contraception, whether to conduct embryonic research and whether to abort foetuses. But it does broaden the perspective of the debate. It still seems to me that aborting foeti is morally dangerous, but we should not use pat arguments that rely on proof-texts or biological distinctions. We should humbly and thoughtfully discuss the issue using arguments grounded in a wide theological perspective.

A broader perspective on reconciliation

2006-09-29T13:19:00.000+08:00

Perusing the Resurgence website today, I came across this paragraph on Anthony Bradley's blog:

Look, redemption is huge. It's more than personal salvation. The redemption achieved by Jesus Christ is cosmic and is directed at all of life, including creation. Men and women are saved by grace so that they may fulfill their role in the kingdom as God's managers of the earth. In a fallen world, this managing function takes on even greater importance as it relates to being 'salt and light.' God has planned to "reconcile to himself all things" (Col. 1:20) through the work and person of Jesus Christ. His church shares and displays this truth in all of life.

Now this, of course, is true. Through Christ's work the whole of creation is reconciled to him; all things are made new. Much of the time this broad, cosmic perspective on the gospel subordinated to a more personalised or individualised conception, where God and I become great mates. This narrower perspective is sometimes appropriate, I think, especially in evangelistic material. But it is unfortunate when seasoned Christians ignore or simply haven't been taught the broader implications of the gospel.

Now here is my problem, and it's not a new one. If it is the case that God has planned to "reconcile to himself all things", why do we deny that salvation is universal among humans? Why can humans, uniquely in the created order, dodge the revitalising power of the gospel? Is it because, unlike the rest of the creation, humans have a responsibility to rule creation on God's behalf, and are therefore held accountable for their actions and attitudes? Is it because original sin emanated from humans to the rest of creation?

I suppose the reconciliation of one human to God (outside Christ, of course), is as good as any number, in that Christ's supremacy has been reestablished. Therefore it doesn't really matter whether salvation is universal or not. I guess this is the outcome of a broader, more cosmic perspective.

Do you have any thoughts?

Blog irony

2006-09-29T10:45:00.000+08:00

As you probably know, I am currently completing a prac placement at a secondary school. Yesterday was the last teaching day of the term, meaning that two weeks of holidays (read marking and programming) follow. Yay! But we still have to come to school today for a bit of PD (professional development). PD is pretty much sitting in a number of seminars that tell you sruff you already know.

Currently I am sitting in a PD seminar about blogging. It has just taken us half an hour to get to the 'set up' page on blogger. So I thought it would be ironic to post during the seminar. How very ammusing.

Jesus as the true Israel

2006-09-27T14:31:00.000+08:00

As a part of his series on Christian Zionism, Chris Tilling has posted this interesting paper by Steve Motyer on his blog Chrisendom. In the paper, Motyer persuasively argues that Jesus is the new Israel. This is a really exciting idea for me. I have spent many years in churches that have taught a dispensational hermeneutic of the OT, an approach with which I have never been comfortable. Consequently, I have reacted by arguing that the church is the new Israel, a widely held but ultimately precarious view. Moyer, however, argues that Jesus is the new Israel (as well as the new Temple and the new High Priest) and backs it up with some strong Biblical evidence. This approach seems far more consistent with Paul's understanding of Christ's role and the centrality of Christ's person and work to the Gospel.

My problem with the dispensational hermeneutic is that it demotes the event of Christ to just another event in the long history of God's redemptive plan. But the NT insists that the Christ event is the end of history, the centre, focus and purpose of the redemptive plan that interprets all previous events. Motyer's argument preserves this Christological rigour. I guess the lesson is that all Biblical hermeneutics starts and ends with Christ; when it doesn't it can lead to all sorts of awful aberrations.

I am who I am

2006-09-17T10:47:00.000+08:00

I recently noticed this witty comparison in a comment posted on the The Resurgence website. The author noted that the Decartes had replaced the "I AM" (of Exodus 3:14 fame) with the "I am" (of cogito fame). What a beautiful way of representing the epistemological shift inherent to modernity!

This basically means that before the shift to modernity the basis for knowing was what God said, that is, our knowledge was a revealed subset of the divine omniscience. Then Decartes set the modern ball rolling by doubting everything except his own ability to think, expressed in his famous line "I think therefore I am". So the basis for knowing shifted from God to self. This was one of the major innovations of modernity, and a presupposition that is still with us.

Lighthousekeeping

2006-09-15T17:51:00.000+08:00

I recently read British novelist Jeanette Winterson's latest offering, a short piece entitled Lighthousekeeping. While not one of my favourite novelists, I admire Winterson's writing for its stylistic beauty and originality. Reading her novels are almost like reading a extended piece of poetry.

This novel reminded me of something I discovered recently: that the most important thing for human life and understanding are stories. We sometime fall into the trap of thinking that stories are for children, or are only 'fictional' (as opposed to 'factual') while, in reality, all we have as humans are stories. Through the telling of stories we work out who we are and why we are here.
By stories I don't just mean novels or films, although these are very influencial ways of telling our stories. I mean something more broad, something that encompasses everything we do and say. Whenever we think or talk we do it through stories, that is, we do it through narratives with characters and events.

Possibly the only thing more essential to the human experience than stories are relationships. It seems to me, however, that relationships are also constructed through stories. That is, we talk about our realtionships by recounting our common history and our hopes for the future.

Understanding that human experience is mediated by narrative has some important implications for the way we live and relate. The most efficient way to communicate is through narrative. So, when I want to teach a lesson or preach a point, a useful place to start is by asking what stories I can tell about it. It also highlights the power of our institutional storytellers, the novelists and filmmakers.

In Lighthousekeeping Winterson uses a nice metaphor to describe this idea. The character of Pew keeps the lighthouse in a remote English town. Pew is a storyteller, and the novel recounts his tales. His stories become the lighthouse for the community, a solid rock upon which to build identity and a light for understanding.

This is the reason that most of the Biblical text is narrative, beacuse this is how we construct knowledge and identity, and understand ourselves and our situatation. The Bible is our Pew and its story our lighthouse. Even the parts of the Bible that do not appear to be stories, like the psalms and Paul's exposition are heavy with narrative. In fact, the gospel itself is a story, the story of the Christ dying and rising to life. This story only makes sense in the wider story of the Bible, God's plan of redemption. We as Christians are devoted to telling this story, beacuse we understand its implications. In the end, it is the last story, the only story, the story within which all other stories make sense.

Thought for the day

2006-05-31T18:48:00.000+08:00

Light a man a fire and he will be warm for a day,
light a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.

Terry Pratchett

The discovery of poetic prose

2006-05-29T19:18:00.000+08:00

In the last couple of months I have discovered the writing of Salman Rushdie. I am just finishing Midnight's Children after having randomly picked up and read his later work The Moor's Last Sigh. Rushdie has summarily taken his position among the handful of authors whose work I aim to collect and reread in the future.

In an interview on ABC Radio National's Book SHow a few months ago, Ruchdie sad that he had recently come to the conclusion that there are two kinds of authors: the 'everything authors' and the 'nothing authors'. By 'nothing authors', Rushdie meant the kind of author that takes a social or cultural detail and builds a complex narrative around it, exemplified by (say) Austen. On the other hand, 'everything authors' try to encompass the whole of human experience within a narrative, or "swallow the whole world", as Rusdie put it. Rushdie was quick to point out that both approaches were legitimate and had produced works of high quality. This seems to me to be a nice distinction, albeit one that suits Rushdie's style, which self-consciously attempts to swallow the whole world. This theme comes up continually in Midnight's Children, where the narrator says that to understand one's self, one must understand everything that has gone before and everything that will come after (and will thus be influenced by) one's self. Although the implicit humanist (not to mention nihilist) position of this assertion should not go unchallenged, the ideas of unbounded narrative and historical situatedness appeal to me.

The second thing to notice about Rushdie's work is the poesy of its prose. I hope this isn't just a cliche. I think that Rushdie's prose is beautiful to read precisely because it conforms to some elementary poetic conventions. Whilst reading Midnight's Children a few days ago, I noticed that Rushdie's prose almost always follows simple metric patterns, in much the same way as Shakespeare's. I consciously began to count the metre and found that whole sentences and even whole paragraphs would follows these patterns. I'm sure this point is passe, but it came as something of a revelation to me.

You may have gathered that I like Rushdie. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of his work.

Is Pentacostalism the new 'foolishness'?

2006-04-05T13:44:00.000+08:00

In 1 Corinthians 1:27 Paul writes that God has used "what is foolish in the world to shame the wise".

I read recently that there are now an estimated half a billion Pentecostal believers in the world, making it the second largest Christian sect after Roman Catholicism. That's not bad going for an understanding that has been around for little more that a hundred years!

We in the reformed evangelical wing of the Church often pillory Pentacostalism for its lack of intellectal sophistication, its unfounded doctrine and its emphasis on experience. I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing. The above figures did get me thinking, however, and asking, where will the majority of Christian believers in our age come from? The answer isn't certain, but it seem that there is a good chance that whan I'm ressurected, most of my contemproary ressurectees will have been Christians of the Pentecostal variety.

So the obvious question is, is the main thrust of God's saving work in the world today taking place within Pentacostalism? Could Pentacostalism, rather than being a watered-down and popularised version of reformed theology, in fact be the new 'foolishness' of God? I don't want to propose an answer to this question, but simply ask it as a new perspective that occured to me recently.

Please understand that I'm not advocating that we all give up our well-thought-out theology and join the Pentacostalist movement. How, then, should we react to this rapidly spreading understanding of God's plans? Perhaps we should acknowledge that while Pentacostals may fall into some quite grievous misunderstandings of the nature of the gospel and God's work, they have and hold a legitimate perspective on the gospel. This perspective may lack sophistication and emphasise experience, but I don't think this fatally jeopardises their gospel.

Maybe it is better to learn from alternative perspectives on the scriptures and the gospel that looking for ways to tear them down or, simply ignoring them. A force as strong and widespread as Pentacostalism cannot be ignored, we must humbly engage with it, both dialectlcally and critically. Who knows, maybe they know something we've missed.

How to save the world

2006-04-03T12:54:00.000+08:00

I have a theory that every great work of literature, art, philosophy or critique, in fact every 'big idea' every expressed, has at its core one theme and purpose: redemption. It seems to me that every significant intellectual work has two things in common. 1. The author expresses their diagnosis of the world's ills and 2. the author outlines their strategy for the cure (or at least treatment) of these ills. That is, the author's aim is to release humanity from the malaise it finds itself in, to save the world. These assertions are not always made explicit; in fact subtlety demands that they are almost always implicit within a narrative or polemic. Nor is my outline prescriptive: a work may lack the former or the latter (usually the latter), but this, I think, is rarely seen in works of great influence or significance.

I'm not sure that there's any way to prove this theory. If I'm right then the number of examples is boundless. Suffice it to say that I haven't yet come across any work that doesn't fit the pattern. One possability is through the theory of Louis Althusser, who reminds us that every word, thought and action is essentially political, that is, bound to power relations and aimed at positive change.

Most works, of course, don't create a completely new diagnosis and cure - they simply retell a certain metanarrative in a particular context. In this way almost all mediaeval European art and writing, not to mention much from other eras, can be seen as expressing the Christian redemptive narrative. Other metanarratives of note include those of Marx, Frued, Muhammed and the postmodern theorists. Take any work from the 19th and 20th centuries and it will likely be influenced by one or a few of these influencial redemptive narratives.

I suppose the application here is for critique. If it is clear that essentially the theme and purpose of a given work of literature or art is redemptive, then the critical questions become very well defined. What does the author think is the problem with the world? and how do they aim to fix it? These two questions should be able to strip bare the subtlest of ideas.

This theory obviously needs some more thought and work put into it. I'll continue posting as it crystalises.

At the bedside

2006-04-02T19:23:00.000+08:00

I'm usually in the process of reading a number of books at any one time. This way my reading can suit my mood, context, time of day, etc. These are the books that I am reading at the moment.

Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
I like to read for a while before I go to sleep. This is a ritual I've observed since I was about eight years old. Right now my bed-time book is Tim Winton's beatiful portrait of life in post-war Perth, Cloudstreet. The best thing about Winton's prose is his uniquely poetic use of metaphor and his disturbingly authentic inclusion of Australian slang. I also love the way he cues the narative direction by switching between the past and present tenses and between the first, second and third persons. And it's cool that arguably the most seminal Australian novel to date is set on the banks of the Swan River.

The Twilight of Atheism by Alister McGrath
An historical survey of the death and rehabilitation of God in the Western cultural tradition from the French Revolution to the present. McGrath basicly argues that the intellectual elite mounted an all-out assult against God in the nineteenth century. By the first decades of the twntieth century the worldview had tricked down to the political classes, leading to some memorable disasters in Germany and Russia. Atheism became a dominant worldview by the middle of the twentienth century, but its success has dwindled in recent decades. Interestingly, McGrath estimates that in the 1950s and 60s around 60% of poeple in the Western world were atheistic, a proportion that has significantly decreased in the past half-century. Although McGrath is a leading historian, he has written this book for the completely uninitiated reader - he even explains who Marx was - and his style is lucid and engaging. I have great admoration for great thinkers who are also great vulgarisers. McGrath is one such writer.

Prayer and the Knowledge of God by Graeme Goldsworthy
This book has been really important for my understanding of the role of prayer in the Christian life. For the past few years one of the big theological problems for me was how to reconcile the ideas of prayer (asking God for things) and a sovereign God (God must be almightly, therefore all things must follow his will). Goldsworthy's study makes a broad survey of prayer in the Old and New Testaments and then builds a theological picture that the novice can understand - another nice piece of vulgarisation. It's been very helpful.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I've just started this novel and I'm finding it almost impenitrable. I think part of the problem may be that I have a really old translation. The interminable dialogue, narratives within narratives and intense Russian names may also be to blame. I am, however, assured by a friend that the reward for my persevereance will be great. I'll keep you posted on my progress.

A new blog

2006-03-31T17:04:00.000+08:00

Hi everyone. Welcome to my new blog. I've started this blog mainly as an exercise in disciplined writing; hopefully writing each day will improve my skills (coz women only like guys with great skills). This said, feel free to post your comments. I'll endeavour to reply to them in record time.