Hiatus on account of travelling

Hi everyone! Just to let you know that there won't be much serious stuff on the blog for the next five weeks or so, as I'm in Europe with my wonderful wife. If you're keen to keep up with our travels, you can follow them here.

I'll be posting some photography here as I go, with the objective being that the last posted photos are significantly better than the first posted ones as I learn :) Here's one I took last night in Paris - the silhouette is my lovely wife.

It's noisy, unsharp and the white balance is totally unnatural, but I like the idea. Hopefully I'll get better as I go on.

Kim Kardashian is Ruining the Sanctity of Marriage

Recently Kim Kardashian, the woman famous for stone-cold nothing in particular, got married to some guy. Even more recently, she divorced that guy - 72 days after she married him, to be exact. She made millions of dollars out of the whole exercise.

Christians hold marriage in pretty high esteem. At the moment, lots of us are keen to uphold that high esteem by continuing to affirm the traditional definition of marriage as between a man and a woman. But really,doesn't this kind of moronic, cynical, celebrity weddingstravaganza rubbish bring marriage into disrepute much more? There's not much becoming one flesh about getting married to some bloke for less than three months and raking in the millions from the subsequent media deals and interviews. How is the undermining of marriage in the name of squillions of dollars and the perpetuation of the empty bubblehead cult of celebrity not a concern for Christians? Someone tell our church leaders that Kim Kardashian is ruining the sanctity of marriage.

The Mad Shepherd

John 10 came up at church tonight:

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep... I know my sheep and my sheep know me—  just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep...The reason my Father loves me is that I lay down my life—only to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.”

It's a familiar passage, and a nice image - that of the good shepherd laying down his life for the sheep. But when you think about it, it's a bit weird. Crazy, even.

There Will Be No Economists In Heaven

This week at Bible study we were talking about money. Actually our study is doing a series on it; this was the second study, but I'd missed the first (and will miss the rest due to being overseas - more on that later maybe). The series is about how Christians should relate to and use money. Something caught my eye in the summary of the first study, though. It was this sentence:

God owns all the money.

Too-Late Post #2: John Piper and suffering

Easily the best picture of Piper on the internet.

Too-Late Post #2 is too late because John Piper was in Sydney on the 31st of August, at the Sydney Entertainment Centre, where he said some things that I was going to blog about but didn't, and now it's halfway through October and I'm only just getting around to it. Anyway, here goes.

Position Vacant: Labor Party Strategist

To whom it may concern,

This is what I imagine a political strategist to look like.

I write to apply for the position of Head Strategist for the Australian Labor Party, on the basis that its current occupant is a moron.

Too-Late Posts #1: On Christian Music

Welcome to Too-Late Post #1! The reason why this post is Too-Late is not because its subject matter is out of date (it's not), but because the thing that set my train of thought choofing along this particular track happened several weeks ago. A few people on Facebook managed to post links simultaneously to the video for the new single by Richard Beeston's band, All Mankind. It's called Break the Spell, and you can find it below, or after the jump:

Too-Late Posts

Well this blog has been silent for a long time. I have been unavoidably busy writing an Honours thesis, but I handed that in yesterday, so you lot get to enjoy the privilege of being further subjected to my ramblings.

I have a list on my computer of things I wanted to blog about, but never got around to doing, so in their honour I'll be making a series of Too-Late Posts over the next few days, inspired by things that happened or things I was thinking about two or three weeks ago. Some of their immediacy may have been lost in the interval, but hopefully they're still somewhat relevant :)

Looking forward to getting back to putting stuff up here!

A Very Short Universalist Thought

Since this is something of a scandalous topic among evangelicals, I'd like to make several disclaimers, which might turn out to be longer than the actual content of the post:

1. Universalism, in this post, means the idea that eventually, in some way, every person will be reconciled to God, and doesn't necessarily imply anything about the timing or manner of that reconciliation;
2. I do not at this point call myself a universalist;
3. I do not intend the following to be a watertight argument, or a proof-text, or anything nearly so convincing, only a thought.

So, with that out of the way, here's the very short thought. Actually it's not even a thought, just a couple of well-known Bible verses that I'd never considered in relation to each other, but did so today and found the exercise interesting. Here they are (you might be familiar with them):

If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Romans 10:9

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
   and gave him the name that is above every name,
 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
   in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
   to the glory of God the Father.

Philippians 2:9-11

That's it.

Lorikeets!

I'm a sucker for parrots of any description - just something about the awkward, lumbering but endearing gait they have when they walk around. Here's a couple of pictures I took today of some rainbow lorikeets playing in the native flora outside our unit:

Christian Ethics and Modelling Heaven

One of the complaints you hear levelled against Christianity every so often is the one about how 'there's too many rules and stuff, man, I don't wanna sacrifice my freedom to do whatever I want, you know'. (Perhaps uncharitably phrased, but you get my drift.) And at first glance, for a religion claiming that following rules won't get you to heaven, there do seem to be a lot of rules.

What I Hate I Do: a Gramscian reading of Romans 7:15-25

 I'm no Marxist, but I've always had a soft spot for the ideas of Antonio Gramsci. For those who, unlike myself,  do not inhabit a university Arts faculty full of communists and other haters of freedom, Gramsci was an Italian Marxist thinker, imprisoned and later executed by Mussolini's fascists. 

The ultimate response...

to any internet argument about creationism versus evolution:

Jesus punches a T-Rex in the head. 'Nuff said. I found this here, click if you're the slightly irreverent shirt-buying type.

A Theology of Refugees

It seems like refugees (or asylum seekers, if you prefer, but not illegal immigrants, they're different) are never far from the headlines here in Australia.  And discussions about refugees are not only ubiquitous, they’re also polarising. As soon as anybody, no matter how well-intentioned, asks the question ‘what should we do with those who come to Australia seeking asylum?’ it’s only a matter of time before somebody calls somebody else a fascist or a hippy, which is the signal for all participants to abandon reason in favour of insults and raspberries. But how should Christians think about refugees? 

Sermon Thoughts: Compelled to Give

So I thought that I'd start doing a (brief) post every Monday or so that talks about the previous Sunday's sermon at church. I admit to selfish motives; doing this will hopefully make me absorb more than I normally do on a Sunday night by lazily drifting through the sermon and doing the odd bit of thought about bits that draw my attention. If other people get something out of it as well, that would be very encouraging (not to mention helpful for justifying my time expenditure in blogging!)

David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions

One of my good friends put me onto William Lane Craig a while ago. Craig is a Christian apologist who, in his debates, often provides a summary of his opponent's shortcomings in a fairly blunt manner that can be rather amusing. I'm currently reading a book by another man who goes by three names: David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions, which does in print what William Lane Craig is wont to do in person.

Johnny Cash, cover songs, and bargaining with God

I promise all those things go together.

A while ago I encountered Johnny Cash's cover version of 'Hurt', originally by Nine Inch Nails. You kind of need to watch the video clip to understand what I'll be rambling on about later, so please take a minute to do so:

Giving and Getting Rich

This is one of the ideas I had that started the blog thing – I was originally going to bother people on Facebook about it, but now it’s here with a pretty background instead.

I was seriously challenged by the sermon at my local church – St Michael’s Anglican, Wollongong – last Sunday. Normally when Christians, myself included, throw around the word ‘challenged’ they mean they were somehow influenced to think differently or more deeply about a certain theological issue, and often the implication is that the different thinking should (and sometimes even does) lead to different behaviour. This was a very practically-minded sermon, though, and the thing that got me wasn’t a theological issue, but actually a rather worldly thing to do with practice. The sermon was from 2 Corinthians 8 and dealt with that irritating topic of money and what we should do with it.

A Fourfold Franciscan Blessing.

May God bless you with a restless discomfort about easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships, so that you may seek truth boldly and love deep within your heart.

May God bless you with holy anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may tirelessly work for justice, freedom, and peace among all people.

May God bless you with the gift of tears to shed with those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, or the loss of all that they cherish, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and transform their pain into joy.

May God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you really can make a difference in this world, so that you are able, with God's grace, to do what others claim cannot be done.

And the blessing of God the Supreme Majesty and our Creator,
Jesus Christ the Incarnate Word who is our brother and Saviour,
and the Holy Spirit, our Advocate and Guide,
be with you and remain with you, this day and forevermore. 

Amen.

Better get started on those photography chops.

Clicky for big version.

This is a panorama of about five or six shots I took in the Blue Mountains (at that viewing platform in Katoomba that everyone's been to). I shot in RAW and I've been trying to generate some different exposures from the original files and reblend into an HDR (to try and deal with the darkness at the bottom versus the white clouds at the top), but the stitching program I'm using seems to give me a slightly different result every time, so blending the differently exposed panoramas is proving to be a headache. Anyone got any ideas?

First words.

Look! A blog!

Welcome, everyone (for a given value of 'everyone', I suppose). Basically I started this because I had an idea that I wanted to share on Facebook, and then I realised that actually I had a lot of ideas that I wanted to share on Facebook, and often I forgot about them because I never got around to writing them down, and quite apart from not telling people about all these good ideas I've been having this was bad for me because thoughts that could have changed my behaviours and my opinions, given enough attention, were drifting half-formed and shapeless into the void, which seemed like a bad way to go about life.