At two months, Jemima

... loves hanging with her mum

... already has attitude

... but gets away with it by flashing sweet smiles!

Climate change and poverty

Suffering The Science, a report into the impact of climate change on people in poverty, is being published by Oxfam today. Most of the gains made by the world's poorest countries over the past half a century will be lost unless action is taken on climate change, it says. Up to 375 million people may be affected by climate-related disasters by 2015.

'Climate change is becoming quite rapidly the central issue to do with poverty today,' Oxfam Australia's chief, Andrew Hewett, has said. 'That also raises deep ethical dilemmas because the people least responsible for this crisis have the least resources to deal with it, and they are also those who are on the front line.'

Read more here and here.

Pic from http://www.oxfam.org/en/campaigns/climatechange/about

A thing of extraordinary beauty

My brother Jon is a composer and jazz musician. To mark Jemima's birth, he wrote her some extraordinarily beautiful, tender music. Close your eyes and have a listen.

Pic: their first meeting

Deity and History II

'The view of the Bible current among many New Testament scholars and theologians is that ... it is not God's Word written, but that it is a record of God's revelation, in particular that it is a record of His revelation in Christ, who is supremely the Word of God. This view of the Bible suffers from many defects which render it untenable.' Broughton Knox, The Everlasting God (1982)

It seems to me that Knox is trying to have his cake and eat it too. Having insisted that the existence of personal Deity is made apparent by the Deity's self-revelation in history, he then argues against approaching the New Testament as anything other than the inspired Word of God, against reading it as mere history. He gives three reasons for his position:

1. Jesus considered the Scriptures to be divinely inspired, as God's past word to present readers, so we should too;


2. To see the Bible as anything less than God's Word written, is contrary to the Nicene Creed; and


3. To see the Bible merely as a record of God's Word 'prevents the Bible from doing its proper work in convicting the conscience and so moving the will of the reader to obedience.'

I suspect there are a few problems with Knox's reasoning here (e.g. surely the conviction of the conscience is the work of the spirit, not a function of the reader's attitude to scripture.) But what really stood out to me was his implicit about-face on the importance of history to Christianity.

If, as Knox claims, a personal deity has indeed revealed himself to humanity by a word or action that has entered into history - say, in the person of Jesus - then surely both Christians and other interested people need to approach the New Testament as history and interrogate the gospels as sources on Jesus. Can we actually come to a conclusion about whether or not Jesus is the revelation of God without any recourse to history? Can we only come to the view that Jesus is divine, with consequences for how we live our lives, if we first regard the Bible as divinely inspired? I am not convinced by Knox's suggestion that reading the New Testament as an historical record of God's Word (i.e. of Jesus), rather than as itself God's word, necessarily obstructs christian faith and discipleship.

In my view, interrogating the documents that comprise the New Testament as one would other historical sources is very worthwhile. They are the best sources we have for Jesus, and thus for investigating his mission and identity. Approaching the gospels as history may be an important step towards the conclusion that Jesus is indeed Emmanuel, God with us - and towards the view that his view of Scripture as God's past Word to the present is the appropriate view for us too.

Jemima at 6 weeks

Deity and history

'If deity not only exists but is personal, the possibility follows that deity may reveal itself to mankind. This possibility is inherent in personality. We ourselves, being persons, may take the initative and reveal ourselves to whom we will, soo, too with personal deity, it may reveal itself to whom it will... [And] Once deity has acted to reveal itself, then the event passes into history. From that moment on, it is an historical event which cannot be eliminated with the passage of time.' - Broughton Knox, The Everlasting God (1982).

This passage really stood out when I came across it this week. (The mothers' bible study group I've joined has just started reading Knox's book). It makes a lot of sense to me - because I adhere to an essentially historical religion. Christianity is centrally concerned with a particular person who lived in a specific place and time. It stands or falls on the life, death and resurrection of a first century Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. It is a religion that invites historical investigation.

Knox's comment made me wonder, though, about the limits of history as a discipline. Does it really give us sufficient tools to settle the general question of the existence and character of the divine? Is history as essential to the integrity or otherwise of non-Christian faith traditions? Perhaps not in cultures that do not conceive of time in a linear fashion, among peoples who do not record or recount their past in ways accessible. I suspect that, while Knox's approach applies well to Christianity, it is inadequate - or rather inappropriate? - for understanding and evaluating a belief system like the Aboriginal Dreaming. Hmm...

Australia: the film

Just got word of this...

To mark a year since its premiere, the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the Australian National University and the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia present

Baz Luhrmann's Australia Reviewed:

An interdisciplinary conference on history, film and popular culture

7 & 8 December 2009
National Museum of Australia, Canberra

'In his fabulous hyperbolic film Australia, Baz Luhrmann has leaped over the ruins of the “history wars” and given Australians a new past – a myth of national origin that is disturbing, thrilling, heartbreaking, hilarious and touching.' - Marcia Langton, 2008.

Arguably Luhrmann’s epic film Australia is the most ambitious, creative and expensive engagement with our nation’s past since the opening of the National Museum of Australia in 2001. Even though it is ostensibly a 1940s romance between the English aristocratic fish-out-of-water, Lady Sarah Ashley and the Drover, a quintessential Aussie bloke, the film engages with recent debates in Australia’s national history from the removal of Aboriginal children from their families to the bombing of Darwin. The backdrop to this mismatched romance is the contradictory racial frontier of northern Australia, where official segregation, casual and entrenched discrimination, and sexual and labour exploitation coincided with inter-racial friendships, illicit relationships and mixed-race children. Luhrmann’s engagement with our nation’s racial past is explicit; the film begins with a definition of the Stolen Generations, and concludes by commemorating Prime Minister Rudd’s 2008 apology.

The film’s release met with both praise and sharp criticism from film critics, politicians and other public commentators. This conference presents an opportunity for scholars to review and extend these initial debates on Luhrmann’s re-visioning of Australia’s past...

Themes and topics for papers may include, but are not limited to

Australia’s national and popular imaginings

- notions of genealogy and inheritance in national imaginings

- reconciliation narratives and shared histories

- land, sovereignty and questions of possession

- the idea of home and belonging

- sexuality and national imaginings

- images of race on the northern frontier

- selling Australia through Australia

Australia and histories

- histories of cattlemen and droving, including Aboriginal workers

- imperial connections and dynasties

- Aboriginal and Chinese labour on the frontier

- World War II, including the bombing of Darwin, the Japanese ‘threat’, and Aboriginal servicemen

- frontier violence and racism

- ‘mixed-relations’: inter-racial relationships and marriages

- Stolen Generations

- native title and dispossession

Australia’s borrowings and the language of film

- filmic references and histories, ie Wizard of Oz, Jedda etc

- histories and representations of Indigenous people in film

- melodrama and constructions of race

- cinematic representations of country and landscape

- material culture studies and film

- Australia and Australian literary influences

All sounds very interesting. Wonder if Germaine Greer will put a paper proposal in?! (My thoughts on the film are back here).

Jemima at five weeks

Sorry, can't help myself from posting these!

J and the doctor

Well, that's finally it. No more significant life events from me for a while now!

Imagining faith and place

I’ve been on a steep learning curve these last few weeks as I’ve begun the adjustment to full-time parenting. My time is basically spent feeding Jemima, changing and washing her nappies and trying to catch up on sleep. Most days we also get out for a walk, and sometimes I’m even able to do some reading.

Our book club book this month was An Imaginary Life by David Malouf. It’s a beautifully written novel about the Roman poet Ovid, whose literary and perhaps personal indiscretions prompted Augustus to banish him to the fringe of the empire - the village Tomis on the shores of the Black Sea. Historians don’t know much about the years Ovid spent there- but in reimagining it Malouf offers a very moving meditation on language and imagination, transformation and exile.

As I was reading aloud to Jemima the other day, I came across an intriguing passage on my favourite themes of religious faith and ideas about landscape:

'Do you think of Italy - or whatever land it is you now inhabit - as a place given you by the gods, ready-made in all its placid beauty? It is not. It is a created place. If the gods are with you there, glowing out of a tree in some pasture or shaking their spirit over the pebbles of a brook in clear sunlight, in wells, in springs, in a stone that marks the edge of your legal right over a hillside; if the gods are there, it is because you have discovered them there, drawn them up out of your soul’s need for them and dreamed them into the landscape to make it shine. They are with you, sure enough. Embrace the tree trunk and feel the spirit flow back into you, feel the warmth of the stone enter your body, lower yourself into the spring as into some liquid place of your body’s other life in sleep. But the spirits have to be recognized to become real. They are not outside us, nor even entirely within, but flow back and forth between us and the objects we have made, the landscape we have shaped and move in. We have dreamed all these things in our deepest lives and they are ourselves. It is our self we are making out there, and when the landscape is complete we shall have become the gods who are intended to fill it.'

The passage struck me for its elegance and for its suggestion of the power of 'dreaming.' Malouf seems to mean more here than 'the world is the product of our imagination', or even 'our souls and the universe are one.' He seems to suggest that, in dreaming, we both express our true, spiritual selves and create the world of which we are part. In the deep dreams he describes, faith and place are one.