JoBlogs

Doom & Gloom

2008-09-17T12:45:00.001+10:00

This is why a lot of the people I work with are looking very stressed. And also why I'm going to a union rally tomorrow!

Spring is sprung

2008-09-15T09:38:00.003+10:00

On Saturday, because it was 25 degrees, we remembered that we live a couple of minutes from this lovely bit of view. Fish and chips, in the balmy outdoors, with a friend and a dog, while the sun went down. Bliss!

Lipstick-wearing Pigs

2008-09-11T09:55:00.002+10:00

Party politics always confuse and alarm me. I often find myself being outraged at the policies of politicians I quite like - and vice versa - and agreeing with commentators whose general viewpoint I detest. For example, I wouldn't vote for Sarah Palin and the Republicans in a million, billion years - but I find myself agreeing with Christopher Hitchens (Christopher Hitchens!!) that much of the criticism of her from people I am politically in sympathy with is inconsistent and hypocritical.

Saints and Psychos (II)

2008-09-08T12:25:00.002+10:00

[In my first post, below, I argued that many modern evaluations of religion impose contemporary categories - such as 'left-wing' and 'right-wing' - upon religious movements in ahistorical and unhelpful ways.]

All this is not to say that there is no place for making moral judgements about the past, or that religion can only be understood by those with a theological education. It is simply to say that analysis of religious cultures and individuals needs to pay attention to religious beliefs and practices, recognising how they have developed over time and how they interact with other social and cultural changes. I’d like to give one example from my own work of the explanatory value of looking closely at the internal logic of a particular religious sub-culture.

My own area of research is early English Methodism, a movement of reform and revival that developed within the Church of England in the eighteenth century. Perhaps the most influential and certainly the most interesting of interpretations of English Methodism was given by the Marxist historian E.P. Thompson in his book The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson painted Methodism as a movement of political and personal repression. Where generations of Methodist historians had portrayed their forbears as saints, in Thompson’s work Methodists are quite definitely psychos. In his interpretation, the emotional upheaval of the Methodist revivals diverted the energies of the English working class away from political activism and towards a rigorous self-discipline that kept them working uncomplainingly in the dark satanic mills of the industrial revolution.

Thompson is particularly damning of the Methodist emphasis on suffering. He argues that in Methodism the Christian symbol of the cross became not just an incentive to personal self-denial, but a model for the whole of life. That is, he argues that for Methodists, the life that pleased God was a life of suffering. This belief made Methodists passive fodder for the factories and workhouses of the industrial cities. Assured that their suffering pleased God, Methodists did not dare to agitate for change.

My study of Methodist culture confirms that, in their hymns at least, Methodists were encouraged to value and welcome suffering as the road to holiness. Quite clearly, such an understanding could lead to the acceptance of injustice. One famous Methodist woman leader wrote of meekly accepting the beatings of her violent husband as the discipline of God for her sins. To this extent, Thompson’s work is, I think, a good model of exploring the way in which a particular doctrinal emphasis, distinctive to Methodism, had broader social and cultural implications.

However, Thompson’s emphasis on the industrial revolution leads him to ignore the full implications of this Methodist belief in the positive value of suffering. This belief could also sustain political and religious activism. A number of early Methodist women defied social convention by becoming preachers. In their letters and journals, they often described the personal cost of this unusual behaviour as a cross they had to bear. They embraced the resulting insult and ostracism as a means by which they could grow in holiness. More broadly, of all religious groups, English Methodists were the most active supporters of the abolition of slavery. Those Methodists who campaigned against slavery often paid a significant price in terms of their health, wealth and social standing. Again, they described this suffering as a cross God had given them to bear, which would eventually lead to a heavenly reward. And it is worth noting that the woman I mentioned above, eventually left her violent husband, believing that God had ordered her to do so.

Recognising the diversity of ways in which early Methodists embraced the ‘cross’ of suffering in this life forces us to go beyond simply characterising them as conservative or progressive, as left or right- wing, as saints or psychos. It may be relevant and indeed I think it is important to make judgements about Methodist complicity in the abuses of English workers during the industrial revolution, and equally to question the value of Methodist activism. But moral judgements of this kind will not help us understand the religious cultures of the past and present and their impact on our world unless we take seriously the systems of religious conviction and practice that informed people’s behaviour at any given historical moment. These are the insights that religious historians can bring to public discussion of religion and its place in our society.

On the Psalms

2008-09-07T15:00:00.002+10:00

Well, after posting the first section of my paper on religious history, I succumbed to one serious virus and have hardly been out of bed since. The rest of the paper is on my computer at work, so I will have to wait till I get back there to post the next installment. In the meantime, I am re-reading one of my favorite books of theology (admittedly, I don't read much theology!), Walter Brueggemann's The Message of the Psalms. These are his wise words on the psalms of lament:

'I think that serious religious use of the lament psalms has been minimal because we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity. We have thought that acknowledgment of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith, as though the very speech about it conceded too much about God's "loss of control".

The point to be urged here is this: The use of these "psalms of darkness" may be judged by the world to be acts of unfaith and failure, but for the trusting community, their use is an act of bold faith, albeit a transformed faith. It is an act of bold faith on the one hand, because it insists that the world must be experienced as it really is and not in some pretended way. On the other hand, it is bold because it insists that all such experiences of disorder are a proper subject for discourse with God. There is nothing out of bounds, nothing precluded or inappropriate. Everything properly belongs to this conversation of the heart.'

Saints and Psychos

2008-08-29T09:46:00.004+10:00

A while ago I gave a paper on the value of religious history, called 'Saints and Psychos: What's the Point of Religous History?' I only had 10 minutes to speak, so it is a rather hurried effort - but I thought I'd post it in installments over the next few days.

What value does religious history have for a secular society? I want to reflect on that question briefly, first by talking generally about the value of religious history in Australia and then by giving one example from my own research. I should say that while I am discussing religious history generally, most of my illustrations come from the history of Christianity, as that is the tradition with which I’m most familiar.

The census statistics suggest that, in spite of recent anxieties over the growing power of religion in Australia, most Australians are personally indifferent to institutional religion. While 80% of Australians identify as having a religious affiliation, just over 60% believe in God (other than occasionally!) and only 25% attend a religious service monthly or more often. If most Australians are not particularly excited about religion, however, this is not representative of much of the rest of the world. In the 60s, Western scholars were busy predicting that secularisation and decolonisation would mean the end of religion, but fifty years on the number of people being born into religious traditions and joining them is booming. Whether one looks at Al Qaeda or the American Christian Right, the political significance of religion in the twenty-first century is obvious.

Concern over these developments has not, however, produced much thoughtful public discussion of religious history. Rather, most public discussion about religion in Australia seems to centre on debates about ‘true’ religion. For example, is ‘true’ Islam expressed in the actions of Palestinian suicide bombers? Is ‘true’ Christianity expressed in the voting patterns of self-identified ‘born again’ Republicans who support George W.? I think here of a recent opinion piece in The Age, which set itself up as an analysis of American churches, but was in fact a lengthy lament over the failure of American Christians to pay attention to the Sermon on the Mount. I don’t want to discount the concerns reflected in such debates. They reflect pressing concerns for a multicultural society trying to live in harmony and wondering whether this is possible if religion inevitably produces violence and intolerance. They reflect the frustrations of those who think that religion is the poison of the masses and want to highlight its dangers. They reflect the concerns of religious communities distressed at being associated with values or actions they detest. But this focus on ‘true’ religion does, I think, distract from important questions about how contemporary manifestations of religious belief and practice have developed historically.

In arguments about ‘true’ religion, history is usually appealed to in the form of examples that act as prooftexts for a particular line of argument. For example, a debate over whether Christianity inevitably produces the kind of aggressive nationalism demonstrated in the US at present. The person arguing that Christianity encourages state violence mentions the Crusades, the German churches during the Third Reich and the Spanish Inquisition. The person arguing that these are not examples of true Christianity points to Francis of Assisi, the anti-slavery reformers and the Catholic church in Chile, resisting Pinochet. And so on, and so on. If you read the letters page of the Age, you will be familiar with this pattern of argument.

This is a limited approach to studying religion, not only because it ignores the historical context of particular expressions of religious conviction, but also because it tends to analyse these developments in terms of categories that have particular modern significance. Categories such as left-wing and right-wing, moderate and fundamentalist or even progressive and conservative. These categories often cut across and distort the internal dynamics of particular religious cultures. If you interpret religion simply in terms of current conceptions of ‘left’ and ‘right-wing’, for example, you may struggle to explain why a Roman Catholic liberation theologian, who supports socialist economic policies, also opposes contraception and abortion. If you interpret religion simply in terms of ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’, you may struggle to explain why evangelical leaders helped spearhead the campaign to decriminalise homosexuality in New Zealand. And while it would be difficult to describe Christians who practice the pacifist and doctrinally loose Quaker tradition as ‘fundamentalist’, when they follow their convictions, as some do, to the point that they are crushed under the wheels of an Israeli tank while defending Palestinian homes, it seems equally inappropriate to describe them as ‘moderate’.

Books Books Books

2008-08-28T19:58:00.004+10:00

I am very, very excited that Neal Stephenson's new novel, Anathem, is about to be published. For smart, sheer fun, you can't beat his books.* Not sure when it will be available in Australia, but Andrew and I may need to take a weekend off to read it. We read his mammoth Baroque Trilogy out loud - the perfect books for an historian and a scientist to share! [NB. Don't start with the Baroque Trilogy if you are new to Stephenson - a couple of hundred pages in and you are deep in Puritan angst and debates on the nature of matter, with thousands of pages to go. I suggest Cryptonomicon for starters!]
On the professional front, I am waiting for a parcel of tasty new books from OUP. I had the opportunity (long story) to choose a bunch of books off their list - I have stocked up on various new titles and classics dealing with the history of missions/gender/evangelicalism. Timely additions to my library, as I am gearing up write a funding application for a major project on the transmission of religious beliefs to the colonies... through evangelical women. My own book manuscript is due in about two weeks, after which I expect to have the time and mental energy to get started on this new project.

*You may want to note that, as Ian pointed out in the comments, Stephenson does tend to put a lot of sex in his books.

War Myths

2008-08-21T09:07:00.006+10:00

Australians only have a very limited range of images within which to imagine the ANZAC experience, as is demonstrated by this staggering introductory paragraph to an article about an unknown soldier in today's Age:

'EVEN though it was just a skeleton, there was still something that said Australian larrikin about the soldier's remains that lay as he fell on a shell-blasted Belgian battlefield 91 years ago.'

I'm not sure how a skeleton suggests that deeply Australian quality, larrikinism - and neither is the writer, who is of course completely unable to substantiate this claim in the following paragraphs.

Aboriginal writing

2008-07-01T08:41:00.002+10:00

A deluge of unexpected jobs last week got in the way of my plans to write about The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature. Happily, though, there's a thoughtful review of the Anthology - particularly the first section, which contains the writing of historical figures such as Bennelong and William Barak - in this week's Eureka Street. Check it out!

Another Book

2008-06-22T20:04:00.005+10:00

At the risk of boring those of you who've already heard about it - this edited collection is one of the things I've been working on for the last six months. It came out of a really stimulating conference that a colleague and I organised last year, at which historians from quite different backgrounds - some postcolonialists, some religious historians - came together to try and talk about the relationship between missionaries and colonialism. Often missions history is done either from a confessional or religious perspective or within a hardcore postcolonial framework. Both of these have their dangers and we wanted to try to get people from these groups to talk to each other and learn from each other. The conference was fantastic - we felt as though it gave evidence of a real change for the better in the way missions history was being written - and we decided we should try to publish some of the papers. If you are near the University of Melbourne on Tuesday 8 July, you can come along and see the result being launched! Or, if you are really keen, pre-order one here for the special price of $35!
(Btw, for those of you who read Faith and Place, Meredith has contributed a wonderful chapter about Richard Johnson - the chaplain of the first fleet, whose picture graces our cover.)

Essential Reading

2008-06-19T08:01:00.006+10:00

I am currently working my way through the wonderful Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature. I can't recommend it highly enough: it should be essential reading for all Australians, particularly Christians. The title is a bit misleading in its use of the word 'literature' - it is in fact a selection of Aboriginal writing. The first section includes letters, petitions and articles written by Aboriginal people from the beginning of white settlement. So it's as much a historical anthology as a literary one.
I haven't had much time for blogging lately, but over the next few weeks I plan to post my thoughts on the works in the Anthology. Let me encourage you to go out and buy a copy - it is a very slim and readable volume, and the selections are mainly short pieces - perfect for reading on the train, while waiting to see the doctor, in ad breaks. And it will change the way you see this country.
* The photo is a detail from the 'missionary window' at St John's Anglican Church, Toorak. The window depicts men of different ethnic groups coming to Jesus. Interestingly, only the Aboriginal and African man are kneeling.

No, no, no, no, no

2008-06-09T15:41:00.002+10:00

There has been much tut-tutting, apoplexy and inter-state phone calling among the Cruickshank clan after the disappointment that was last night's showing of Persuasion on the ABC. If you haven't seen it, imagine what Reader's Digest would do with the story. I can understand the need to cut down the dialogue and plot for reasons of time, but removing almost all of the extended dialogue and replacing it with pointless and unlikely 'action' scenes.... no, no! All those wonderful, character-revealing conversations gone! As a consequence, we lose most of the satisfying subtlety of Austen's characters - from Anne Elliot herself to a minor but fascinating character like Lady Russell or Captain Benwick.

And replacing all this dialogue with action is equally unhelpful. The whole strength of Austen's world is the depiction of characters - particularly women - within incredibly frustrating limitations. Anne Elliot is meant to be profoundly constrained - by her society, by her family, by her personality. She is not meant to be sobbing hysterically all the time and running around Bath. She does not pash her husband in public.

I fear this bodes ill for the rest of the movies in the ABC Austen series. And I was really looking forward to Northanger Abbey!

Insane Holy

2008-06-03T15:30:00.002+10:00

Andrew and I have been reflecting (again!) on jobs, careers, security and similar, in the light of Deuteronomy 8: 3 ('Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.') So this was both timely and amusing.

Meme

2008-05-13T20:54:00.002+10:00

My sister-in-law has tagged me on this movie meme that Ben started, so I am thinking hard...

1. One movie that made you laugh
Zoolander.

2. One movie that made you cry
I cry in almost anything. But particularly Wit. Andrew and I both cried just hearing the story of it. Then we cried when we watched it. Then we cried telling someone else about it.

3. One movie you loved when you were a child
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

4. One movie you’ve seen more than once
Galaxy Quest

5. One movie you loved, but were embarrassed to admit it
The Bodyguard

6. One movie you hated
True Lies. Don't get me started.

7. One movie that scared you
No Country for Old Men.

8. One movie that bored you
Idiocracy

9. One movie that made you happy
Babette's Feast

10. One movie that made you miserable
Nobody Knows. Which is a really, really sad Japanese film.

11. One movie you weren’t brave enough to see
I constantly chicken out of movies. Pan's Labyrinth is a recent example.

12. One movie character you’ve fallen in love with
Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell in Top Gun. (Hey! I was 13!)

13. The last movie you saw
Iron Man (see previous post)

14. The next movie you hope to see
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day or The Painted Veil - on Thursday!

15. Now tag five people: I tag Stephen and Meredith - and anyone else who would like to participate!

Iron Man

2008-05-12T20:27:00.003+10:00

I'm a sucker for super-hero stories, so last night we went along and watched the latest Marvel Comics adaptation, Iron Man. For a light-weight movie, it had a certain style - Robert Downey Jr is a talented fellow, and more power to him for coming back from addiction.
Ultimately, though, the movie left a rather nasty taste in my mouth. Much of the action is set in Afghanistan, and you get a very small glimpse of how brutal and terrifying that conflict has become. While there is a certain subversive undercurrent to the storyline, the suggestion that what is really needed to sort things out is more violence (provided by more effective technology) rings sickeningly hollow.
It made me think again of an idea I've had for a TV series starring a (fictional) crack team of pacifists. Yes, pacificists! Each week they would be confronted with a challenging new conflict situation, to which they have to find a non-violent solution. What I love about this idea is that I think it would showcase the creativity of non-violence. If you rule out the possibility of violence, you have to really use your brain.
Some might consider this show unrealistic - but surely no less realistic than the fantastical fictions with which we are regularly presented, in which shooting people solves problems. Oh yeah, that's how things work in the real world.

Out of Ideas

2008-05-06T20:45:00.003+10:00

At the moment I am juggling more ideas/projects than seems sensible. My paid work (basically full-time) is an Australian history project, which currently involves co-writing a book chapter, editing a conference series and working on a conference paper - each involving different sources, periods and topics. In my own research area of British history, I am trying to work on a book manuscript (due in June!! due in June!!) based on my thesis WHILE writing articles and conference papers based on the quite different project I began researching earlier this year in the UK. I also have quite a few other things going on outside work. So, as the boy in the Far Side cartoon said, my brain is full!
I am sorry to find that, as a result, I am all out of new ideas. I need a really good idea, on which to base a major research proposal, for a three-year post-doc. It has to be a Goldilocks kind of idea - not too big, not too small, sexy enough to catch the eye of the proposal-drunk readers, but not too sexy (in case I get pilloried in the columns of The Australian for wasting the taxpayer's money), relevant to my existing track record but not simply repeating my previous work. Faced with this daunting criteria, asking myself 'What would I really like to work on for three years?', my brain draws a blank. I just have no idea!

Hazardous Reading

2008-05-04T19:28:00.002+10:00

I may have blogged about this before, but I will say it again: reading should not be attempted while walking. I have a very bad habit of combining the two activities, which on various occasions has resulted in:
- crying in the middle of the footpath because I had just read a particularly moving poem;
- walking straight past a large sign into a patch of very wet cement (the workmen standing next to the sign just looked at me incredulously as I lifted my head from the page)
- standing on an escalator for five minutes or so without noticing that the escalator was not moving. People were pushing past me to get up the escalator for the entire time. It was only when one of them laughed out loud that I noticed I was stationary.
It still hasn't entirely cured me. I just find the written word so deeply alluring, I find it very difficult to hold an unread book or a newspaper or even a bill in my hand, and not start perusing it - even if I'm running for the train. I would like to think that is evidence of some profundity on my part, but the sad reality is it doesn't have to be quality literature - when I walked into the cement I was reading the phone bill.

Getting Together

2008-05-01T16:25:00.005+10:00

On Tuesday night, a friend and I went along to a Reconciliation Get-Together organised by GetUp. Fifteen people - most of us strangers to each other - got together in a local cafe to talk about what reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians might look like in our nation and in our local community - and how we could be part of that. It was a diverse group with lots of different backgrounds and experiences but a common passion for justice and reconciliation. I was honoured to hear peoples' stories and be part of the conversation. Across the country around 350 other groups were doing the same thing. You can read about Byron's experience here.
On 26th May GetUp is encouraging people to meet again to continue the conversation and to mark Reconciliation Week. If you are in Australia, I'd urge you to get along to a get-together - or even host one!

delightful distractions

2008-04-24T16:06:00.003+10:00

It goes without saying that I do not need any more distractions on the web. Nonetheless, in the last couple of months I have become quite taken with a couple of webcomics. In particular, I enjoy a week-daily fix of Scarygoround While I was in the States briefly earlier this year, I had terrible jet-lag and ended up spending rather a lot of early morning hours reading chapters of this light-heartedly spooky and beautifully-drawn comic courtesy of the hotel's wireless internet. 'Whimsy' is the middle name of its creator, John Allison.
I also love Kate Beaton's work - particularly her historical series. Sadly, she posts a lot less often! Not that I can talk...

Slashie

2008-04-16T12:44:00.002+10:00

I met someone this weekend who introduced themselves (with good reason!) as a 'writer'. It got me thinking about what it is that I actually do in my working life. I usually say I'm a historian, because I spend most of my days reading, researching, talking and writing history. And I work more than I get paid, so it's more than just employment. (I still find it amazing that I get paid at all to read and write - luxury!)
But recently I have been consciously trying to expand my writing horizons - writing some reviews of popular fiction, resurrecting an old fiction project of my own - and it has struck me that I would probably write better if I understood this as an important part of my historical craft. I could describe myself in 'slashie' terms as a writer/historian! Switching my focus to the writing itself - not just the reading, thinking, researching that precedes it - would probably encourage me to write more imaginatively, creatively, clearly. Something that is perhaps not valued or modelled enough in much historical writing!

Excuses, excuses...

2008-04-14T20:10:00.007+10:00

The thing about not blogging is that it becomes addictive... the longer you don't blog, the more embarrassing and ridiculous it seems to actually post something. However, of all the excuses I could make for why I haven't blogged for months, one no longer applies. See that little yella fella in the front of the photo? Mobile broadband, baby.

Facebook killed the Blogging Star

2007-11-08T09:05:00.000+11:00

The discovery of a legion of old friends on Facebook has taken up much of my 'free' internet time over the past few months. And a status update is so much easier than an entire post. [insert lengthy rant on the concentration span of Gen X here]. On the plus side, I just got thoroughly trounced in a game of Scrabulous by three school friends who live in Sweden, Dubai and the USA, and who I havent seen for 15 years!

hmmm...

2007-08-29T08:38:00.000+10:00

Well, a very quick post to say that I am still alive! It's been a busy semester of lecturing and researching, as well as a couple of trips back to Brisbane after my grandfather died unexpectedly a month ago. It has been good to have time with my family and reminded me of the value of taking time off... something I hope to do a bit more in the next month or so!
This weekend I am speaking about nineteenth-century evangelical women activists, to a meeting of Christians for Biblical Equality. I'm enjoying adding to my rather basic knowledge about a generation or two of women whom I admire enormously but who also left us with a rather problematic heritage.
Then I am off to England in a fortnight for a Charles Wesley extravaganza... it's a small conference celebrating the tercentenary of his birth, but the organisers have attracted some scholarly 'big hitters' as keynote speakers, including Mark Noll and Phyllis Mack. I am speaking about Wesley's hymns 'For Condemned Malefactors', which he wrote for those he visited in prison. I suspect mine will be one of the odder papers!
When I get back I am helping to run a day conference on 'Missions and Colonialism', which should be fantastic (if I say so myself!) - lots of new research and conversation about how missionaries furthered or resisted the British imperial project. To my mind, a very important question.
In the meantime, I have a couple of posts in mind. If I can steer clear of facebook for long enough, I will try to get them written!

The Historian

2007-07-16T09:04:00.000+10:00

On the long flight back from Perth recently, I got stuck into Elizabeth Kostova's book The Historian. With a title like that, it had to be worth reading! I had heard good things, and it was indeed an engrossing read. It's basically a re-telling of the story of Dracula, recounted through a family quest across centuries and continents. Along the way, there are plenty of gothic chills, romantic sub-plots and sweeping historical narratives (for people who like that kind of thing). It's a kind of like The Da Vinci Code would have been if it was well-written, historically informed, and not blindingly predictable. My only quibble is that at times I thought it took itself a bit too seriously... perhaps it's just my disturbing sense of humour, but I see obvious comic potential in the subject of the search for Dracula! Overall, though, I recommend it.
Perhaps not as late-night reading for beautiful young maidens, though!

busy, busy

2007-07-13T09:13:00.000+10:00

I've been out of town for a while, and am now back working through all the tasks that were neglected while I was away. I start lecturing (for the first time) in a week or so and I am starting to wonder whether I'm up to it. Nothing like a new job to cause an existential crisis. Do I actually know anything, I ask myself?

This Book is Not Good

2007-06-28T11:31:00.000+10:00

Eugene McCarreher really, really doesn't like Christopher Hitchens' new book. While I found this enjoyable reading, it was kind of a guilty pleasure: it felt a bit like being in the audience of an arena watching a very cross lion have Christopher for lunch.
H/T Byron.

Making a Difference

2007-06-26T17:04:00.000+10:00

The news is full of the tragic state of Aboriginal communities - and the radical initiatives proposed by our PM to improve the situation. I've been discussing this online and in person over the past few days, but I don't have a clear opinion on whether these initiatives are good or bad - or a bit of both. I don't feel informed enough to make sweeping judgements. (Many of you would be amazed to hear that I think I need information in order to make sweeping judgements, I know!)
What does concern me, though, is the way in which this situation is being used to portray Aboriginal communities in a very familiar way. The message seems to be: Aborigines can't help themselves, so 'we' (Federal Government, non-Aboriginal people, experts) need to step in and fix things. I have nothing against intervention per se. But I think that firstly, to blame Aboriginal people without taking seriously our responsibility as a nation for this situation is both historically and morally wrong. And secondly, I think there should be recognition of the many examples of positive changes that have come from within Aboriginal communities.
As just one example, let me mention Woolaning Homeland Christian School. Check out a fascinating paper on the birth and (literal) vision of this initiative. In the midst of our urgency to fix things, to bring about change, we need to not forget the many Aboriginal people who have long laboured to bring about change in their communities - and achieved amazing things - without much support at all. Surely we should be listening to their voices as we seek solutions? Surely they should be given the opportunity to lead the way?

William Cavanaugh

2007-06-01T14:12:00.000+10:00

I have been a big fan of the Roman Catholic theologian William T Cavanaugh since I became aware of his work during his visit to Melbourne last year - I was privileged to be part of a small group that discussed with him his work on torture and found him particularly thoughtful and gracious. I have been dipping in and out of his book Torture and Eucharist all year... as a model of historical reflection informed by theology (or perhaps the other way round) I find it an exciting and challenging read.
The Roman Catholic blog GodSpy has an excellent interview with him where he discusses his ideas about the church, the eucharist and politics... as well as other interesting stuff. Check it out.

HT to DW Congden.

Further on Friendship

2007-05-25T15:53:00.001+10:00

For, in good truth, a friend is more to be longed for than the light; I speak of a genuine one. And wonder not: for it were better for us that the sun should be extinguished, than that we should be deprived of friends; better to live in darkness, than to be without friends. And I will tell you why. Because many who see the sun are in darkness, but they can never be even in tribulation, who abound in friends. I speak of spiritual friends, who prefer nothing to friendship. Such was Paul, who would willingly have given his own soul, even though not asked, nay would have plunged into hell for them.With so ardent a disposition ought we to love.

John Chrysostom, Homily II on 1 Thessalonians

headline

2007-05-17T12:50:00.000+10:00

I don't usually have much praise for the trashy, free "news"paper mX that gets handed out on Melbourne public transport of an afternoon. With a few thin columns like 'Boring but Important' and 'Doom and Gloom' to let you know what is actually going on in the world, it's largely devoted to celebrity gossip. But a recent headline showed some class. Over a front page article describing Robert Mugabe's outraged response to John Howard's decision to cancel the Australian cricket team's trip to Zimbabwe, the headline ran:
Despot Calls Kettle Black.

letters to the editor

2007-05-15T17:12:00.000+10:00

I've been in a letter-writing mood recently, and some of my rants have even been published. But in the process, I've learned a few valuable (and slightly painful) lessons. One of the letters I wrote was to TMA, in response to a recent article on what we can learn from Wilberforce. I thought it was a good and worthwhile article, but it was entirely focused on what Wilberforce did right, and given my thoughts on this, I thought a more balanced perspective would also be helpful. So I fired off a letter that pointed out a few of Wilberforce's less positive attitudes/achievements - his confidence in the 'God-given' social order, his support for legislation to suppress and punish working-class activists and his efforts to halt the involvement of women in the abolitionist cause. I suggested that we needed to learn from his mistakes as well as his impressive successes.
The letter was published, and this edition of TMA contains two letters in response. One, from the original author of the article was pleasant, thoughtful and raised several more good points about the historical context. The second writer was not so measured. He obviously read my letter as a mean-spirited attack on a great man. He criticised my facts, my historical method, my agenda and my conclusions. He accused me of sounding like a 21st century liberal progressive, which I am horrified about (really)! I'm composing a reply that is as conciliatory as I can make it while still holding firmly to my original argument, but in the meantime I've learned a few lessons about writing to the paper. I share them with you, dear readers, in the hope that you will never offend so unintentionally.

Never, ever send a letter to the editor from your work email, even if you are writing on a topic of personal expertise. Sending a letter with my signature block from the 'School of Historical Studies' clearly made me sound like some kind of know-it-all historian who was trying to throw my weight around. (OK, maybe I was, a bit! I've repented!)
Making an historical point in a letter to the editor is not the same thing as making one in a journal article. It's all much more personal and (not surprisingly!) less academic. But at the same time, it's much shorter - so it's hard to be as nuanced as I'd like to be. As a result, it's easy to be/sound glib or harsh.
Never underestimate the extent to which Christians feel personally protective of their historical 'heroes'. This is an issue I feel strongly about, but I realise I have to tread gently. I think Wilberforce was an amazing and inspirational figure. I also think he left us with some very unhelpful attitudes to social action that we have still not fully critiqued. But I need to respect people's loyalty and devotion to their heroes.

I am working on my letter in response, and I will post a version here so you can decide whether I've learned these lessons well enough!

Promises and piecrusts

2007-05-10T09:24:00.000+10:00

What I think about the budget.

Friendship

2007-05-09T09:32:00.000+10:00

'Frequently with groans & tears have I said before the Lord: 'O that I could meet with a friend as divinely inlightened and as faithfull as her I have lost, it would be worth going over red hot bars of iron to purchase, but tho' I know of some of the Excellent of the Earth... yet friendship is so immediately the gift of God, that we cannot form it when we will, there must be similitude of mind, a something which God alone can give...' Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, Autobiography.

I am preparing a paper on the meanings of friendship in the autobiography of Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, a famous early Methodist preacher and pastor. Bosanquet Fletcher had a series of intense friendships with other Methodist women, which were incredibly important to her in practical, spiritual and emotional ways. While she worried about the dangers of such friendships becoming idolatrous, she also celebrated the importance and value of friendship in the life of the believer, as a gift of God. It has made me conscious that I haven't seen much theological work on 'friendship'. Can anyone recommend a book or two?

Merry Men

2007-05-07T10:08:00.000+10:00

Somewhat to my embarrassment, I've developed a bit of an addiction to the new BBC series of Robin Hood. There's lots to criticise about it. Robin himself looks far more likely to have just returned from fronting a Brit Pop band and dating Kate Moss than defending King Richard against the Saracens. The dialogue and plot are riddled with painfully obvious and ahistorical comparisons to present day concerns: When Robin is arrested by the Sheriff in episode two, Marian tells Guy of Gisborne that Robin is legally entitled to a trial. Not any more, sneers Guy. During a time of war, the security of the state is paramount: the Sheriff has suspended the laws entitling suspects to a trial, and sentenced Robin to immediate death. How dastardly! It's eye-rollingly unsubtle. And now Robin has started dropping quotes from the Qur'an to show what a new age warrior he is (he might have killed a lot of Saracens, but at least he understands their culture!).
At the end of the day, however, Robin Hood is a compelling story. I've loved it in every form - from Prince of Thieves to Men in Tights. And this series gets the central elements right: there are cackling villains and dashing heroes, the merry men are bumbling but courageous, very few people actually get killed, Marian is feisty and frequently right, and the off-scene presence of Richard the Lionheart provides the promise of ultimate restoration. So don't invite me out on Sunday nights for the next three months!

deleted post

2007-05-04T09:27:00.000+10:00

My husband was a bit alarmed by my last post about my use of Google Books as a research short-cut, because he thought it might come back to bite me. Imagine, at my first serious job interview, a leading question about how I use Google Books! So I've deleted it. But really, my conscience is clear. I would never imply or suggest that I had read an entire book or was familiar with the details of its argument merely on the strength of reading the introduction. But I would happily use relevant quotes from a section of a book I had read - and comment on those quotes - without reading the whole book. This is standard practice and no different whether one accesses the book in the library or on Google Book. The fact that you don't always have access to the whole book on Google Book does, however, add some sense of dodgy dealing to the whole process!

Thinking, thinking

2007-05-02T09:07:00.000+10:00

In spite of the sporadic nature of my blogging, Simon has very kindly nominated me for a 'Thinking Blogger' award. The rules require me to nominate a couple of other thoughtful bloggers, and while many of the blogs I read have already been nominated, I'm delighted to highlight a few of the blogs on my roll. In case you haven't visited them already, do check out:
Meredith at faith and place, who writes very thoughtfully on the history and theology of places and spaces, as well as a multitude of other interesting subjects. Her current posts on historians are terrific!
Greg at consequently.org, who muses on logic (and occasionally theology/politics/academic life) and keeps a fascinating list of links on all sorts of topics.
Stephen at greenflame, who writes on science, science fiction, theology and all things technological - a superb source of reflections, links and resources for anyone interested in these subjects!
Enjoy!

Bartlett and the Bishop

2007-05-01T13:04:00.000+10:00

Over at Frankly Mr Shankly, a post that has two of my favorite thinkers in conversation!

busy month

2007-04-30T09:08:00.000+10:00

A feeble excuse for not posting all month, but it has been busy!

The 'ethics' of torture

2007-03-29T14:35:00.000+10:00

In Australia, public debate over the ethics of the 'war on terror' has recently focused on the situation of David Hicks to the exclusion of almost all else. While I find the treatment of Hicks - and the Australian government's long-standing unwillingness to challenge his detention - horrifying, it concerns me that Australians seem more worried about the specific case of Hicks than about the broader illegality and inhumanity of the situation at Guantanamo. This piece by the philosopher Slavoj Zizek is a powerful discussion of the issue of torture at Guantanamo - well worth reading.

History for the Church (3): The Big Picture

2007-03-22T15:23:00.000+11:00

I have recently come across a number of on-line discussions of the question: Why don't men go to church? Given the stats - women significantly outnumber men in every Western denomination - such discussions are not new. Participants tend to suggest a number of reasons for this phenomenon, from the 'femininity' of worship styles ('men hate silence and soppy songs'), to feminism ('men are pushed around by women at church'), to the sexism of the church ('men object to the way women are treated in churches'). Suggestions such as these are hotly debated, largely by reference to personal experience. eg, 'I'm a woman and I hate soppy songs' or 'I'm a man and I love soppy songs'.
What such discussions almost never do, however, is consider the most basic of historical questions. Has it always been like this? If not, when and why did it change? Questions like these immediately force us away from micro-issues to a broader perspective. In this case, for example, a very little research will demonstrate that the gender imbalance in churches in the Western world started to become apparent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.* Interestingly, American settler churches were predominantly female almost from the beginning, whereas in Britain the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries appear to have brought about this shift. With this information, it immediately becomes obvious that soppy songs and feminism are unlikely to be highly significant factors in this change. Without proposing a definitive answer, this historical perspective suggests we might need to look to issues like industrialisation, changes in class structure, the development of new denominations and theologies, and the changing relationship between church and state. How have these changes affected the way Christians 'do' church? And, how have these changes affected what it means to be a woman or a man?
The value of considering this historical perspective lies not only in its power to explain the present. It also encourages us to look at broader, deeper meanings than those suggested by our own experience. For example, if we change our music or run 'men's-only' groups in order to attract men to church, we may indeed be successful. But we will not be asking the really difficult, and perhaps really important questions about whether our culture or the gospel determines how we as churches talk and think about what it means to be male or female, what it means to be part of a church, and how the two fit together.
This, then, is my next suggestion about the value of history for the church. In my last post I argued that looking at the past helps us ask different questions about the present. Here I am suggesting that looking at the past helps us answer questions about the present differently. History can alert us to the big picture, to the shifts in society and culture that influence us in profound but often imperceptible ways. It keeps us from allowing our own experience to dominate our interpretation of present events. At its best, it confronts us with the gospel, which is always preached and lived in a particular time and culture, to which it is always a word of both judgement and grace.

wilberforce and the evangelical left

2007-03-01T10:07:00.000+11:00

I'm hoping to get back to my history for the church series soon, but in the meantime I noticed this interesting article, which discusses an issue I have referred to briefly: the use of William Wilberforce as a pin-up boy by evangelical lefties.

Worth reading

2007-02-16T11:46:00.000+11:00

A trip to our local library a couple of weeks ago netted a haul of fine reading, which I have been working my way through. I can recommend:
Annie Proulx, Bad Dirt - These short stories continue Proulx's fascination with Wyoming - they read like something Garrison Keillor would write after listening to the entire works of the Bronte family on tape. A mix of humourous eccentricity and gothic chills, all rooted deeply in the plains and forests of Wyoming.
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go - reading Kazuo Ishiguro is like finding yourself being carefully wrapped in strands of sadness by a very cunning spider. This book ranges from bittersweet to melancholy to heartbreaking and back again, through the rather unlikely combination of English boarding-school tale and futuristic sci-fi. It's very good and it's very, very sad.
Kate James, Women of the Gobi - not from the library, but I bought a copy because it was written by a woman I went to school with in India. After giving up on her attempts to fit the evangelical mold of her family, Kate became fascinated by the exploits of a trio of missionary women who travelled across the Gobi Desert in the early twentieth-century. She went to China to follow in their footsteps and through her journey try to confront her own loss of faith. Travel-writing can be self-indulgent, but this is self-reflective in the best sense - funny and interesting and very moving.

History for the Church (2): Seeing our blindspots

2007-02-14T09:22:00.000+11:00

As part of my current research, I have been reading the journals of a missionary who worked in an Aboriginal community in North Queensland at the beginning of last century. New to the mission field and newly-married, his diary records the increasing tension between the senior missionary couple, already resident in the community, and him and his wife. Finally, in the entry before his departure to establish a new mission nearby, the missionary records in painful detail his full horror at the situation he has found himself in: the senior missionaries have been repeatedly and brutally beating the Aboriginal children under their care. Through the thin walls of their adjoining houses, the junior missionary and his wife listen to the wails of the children as they are beaten, but believe themselves unable to intervene because of the authority that the senior missionaries have over them.
This is the kind of material that rarely makes it into 'church' history - in fact, standard accounts of this particular mission praise the senior missionary for his industry and piety in conventional terms. Church historians, under the onslaught of the postcolonial critique of missionary endeavours as inherently imperialist, have been generally concerned to defend the virtue of missionaries, and wary of hanging out the church's dirty linen. I think this is short-sighted. Recognising and facing up to the failures of the past seems to me a distinctively Christian duty in history, and one which will be both liberating and instructive. As my title for this post suggests, I believe a charitable but honest and critical study of our common past will allow us to identify and guard against recurrent blindspots in our theology and praxis.
For example, the account of these senior missionaries and their violence pushes us back to our theology of sin. In the Australian context, missionaries were far too often placed in situations where they had extensive authority over vulnerable people and virtually no accountability. At the same time they were poorly supported, profoundly isolated and under incredible stress. The naivety (and racism) that assumed that such situations would not regularly lead to (at best) authoritarianism and (at worst) abuse is simply incredible. But it should shock us into considering the situations today in which we assume that simply because someone is (or claims to be) a Christian, they can safely be given power without accountability. This does not mean that we view those in power - parents, church leaders, missionaries, politicians - with nothing but cynicism. But it does mean that we are not naive about their power or the potential that it creates for evil as much as for good.
History is not a panacea - it cannot show us all our blindspots, as however hard we look we are often still bound by our own agendas and assumptions. But I believe it can recall us to our theology, and force our eyes open to hard truths, helping us to repent of the sins of the past, seek forgiveness and reconciliation, and lead us to find new ways of being church that avoid repeating those sins in the present.

History for the Church (1): What is it good for?

2007-02-03T03:04:00.000+11:00

My husband has been thinking about writing a short story set in a post-apocalyptic Southern American community which has been ravaged by some kind of virulent virus. The consequences of this virus include an inability to remember beyond the short to medium term - people in this community only retain memories of the last few years. Into this community comes a figure called 'The Historian' - someone who is able to discover and record the past experiences of individuals and the community as a whole. The question posed by the story is: How much difference does having a history make? Can a marriage be saved if an estranged couple are reminded of their romantic meeting and early happiness? Can a community find new unity and purpose when given access to the story of their past? Alternatively, can access to truth about the past be destructive?
I'm hoping Andrew will write this story - and not just because I've always wanted to read fiction with an historian as superhero! It poses the same question I am considering here, though in a different context - what is history good for in the context of the life and witness of the church? Keeping in mind that far better scholars than I have written books on this topic, I am merely going to use my next couple of posts to suggest a few reasons why the church should pay attention to history.
Let me start by saying that by 'history', I do not mean a simplistic 'theologising' of the church's past. I am not devaluing theologians, or the importance of a theological framework for Christians making sense of history. Theological history is, of course, a worthwhile kind of history - but it is an intellectual history, which emphasises the genealogy of ideas over and above broader social and cultural changes. So, for example, the Reformation can be understood primarily in terms of the theologies of Luther, Calvin and Zwingli and their interactions with the theologies of the Roman Catholic church. This is not wrong, but it is inadequate. It is inadequate because it suggests that ideas exist in a vacuum, rather than within a far broader historical context in which they can be evaluated and understood. It is also inadequate because it sees change as emanating from the ideas of a few individuals - which almost inevitably leads to a history of 'great white males'.
My own area of history provides a clear example of this problem. The history of early Methodism has, until recently, focused primarily on the thoughts and actions of John Wesley, with some attention paid to secondary figures such as Charles Wesley or John Fletcher. All of these men were very important to Methodism and all of them were fine thinkers and strategists. But only recently have scholars begun to notice that a substantial majority of early English Methodists were women. In addition to the unusual women who became preachers, women were involved in pastoring, evangelising, home visitation, class leadership, hymn-writing and the teaching of children. It is fair to say, I think, that women's pastoral and evangelistic efforts were the Methodism that many of their contemporaries encountered. Through their actions and choices women shaped Methodism in significant ways, and yet their contribution has hardly been studied. This is not just a problem for those who want to recover the place of women in church history, it is a problem for anyone who is sincerely interested in the phenomenon that was and is Methodism. Studying the theology of Methodism - understood as John Wesley's sermons, Charles Wesley's hymns, John Fletcher's writings - is not adequate to explain and evaluate the movement and its significance. Rather, we must use the tools that historians have developed - attention to social, cultural, political and geographic contexts - to explain change over time.
In the first place, then, I want to note that for good reasons Christians are concerned with theology - but theology alone will not help us to understand the past. In my next couple of posts I will go further to suggest some reasons why a broader understanding of the past is a useful thing f0r the church.

good news story

2007-02-01T09:55:00.000+11:00

In a world full of bad news, this is well worth reading.

History For The Church

2007-01-27T12:39:00.000+11:00

Over the next couple of weeks, I want to reflect on a question that I've been wrestling with for some time: What does it mean to study and write history for the church? That is, what do those of us who are both practising historians and practising Christians have to offer the church through our skills and training? I'm going to reflect on my own experiences as both historian and pew-sitter, but I'd also love to hear what others think - whether as historians, churchgoers, ministers, theologians or misc! What do you think historians have to offer the church?
I have deliberately chosen the title 'history for the church' for this series, because this is how I want to imagine my role as a Christian and historian: whatever the subject of my research, whatever the primary audience for my findings, in some sense I want to be orientated to serving the community of faith. This is something of a change for me. I write history that is directly concerned with the place of Christianity in past changes. But my approach to that subject is broadly 'secular' - that is, I don't seek to directly identify divine involvement in that process of change. In fact, I have been quite resistant to 'church history', which in my experience has often been history controlled by current theological and denominational agendas, to the detriment of any serious engagement with the complexities of the past. One example in evangelical circles is the tendency to portray the politically conservative anti-slavery activist William Wilberforce as some kind of left-wing progressive, which prematurely shuts down any thoughtful analysis of the distinctive strengths and weaknesses of the evangelical tradition of social involvement. Wilberforce, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King and Bono blur together as roughly equivalent figures!
In the next couple of weeks, therefore, I hope to think about some more constructive models for the church in engaging with historical questions. I want to consider 'history for the church' both at a broad, theoretical level - what is the role of history in the community of faith? - and at a very practical level - what role can historians play as members of the local and scattered church? These are big questions, and I don't promise to arrive at any comprehensive conclusions - but I hope you'll join in the ponderings!

listening to...

2007-01-18T08:44:00.000+11:00

The felicitous combination of Christmas presents and Christmas sales has left me with a swag of great new music, which I am enjoying enormously. I can heartily recommend:

Emiliana Torrini, Fisherman's Woman
The Audreys, Between Last Night and Us
Missy Higgins, The Sound of White
Sophie Koh, Silly Thing
Wailin' Jennys, Firecracker

OK, so there's a ridiculous preponderance of women singing sweetly to the sound of strings, with just enough acidic edge to keep it from being totally saccharine. I can also recommend Sufjan Steven's Songs for Christmas (man singing sweetly to the sound of strings, with just enough acidic edge...etc.) if for no other reason than the terrific title of 'Get Behind Me Santa', one of the carols he composed. But basically, to quote The Audreys, 'If this is the state you find me in, blame it on the banjo and violin...'.

New Year, New Resolutions

2007-01-16T09:17:00.000+11:00

I'm back at my desk after three relaxing weeks in Queensland, and along with my other fairly predictable new year's resolutions (eat more vegetables, pray more, swim more, file more, stress less, read the pile of books I collected in second-hand bookshops while on holiday) I am determined to get back into blogging. I have a couple of series in mind - one on history for the church (as opposed to 'church history'), one on WIlliam Cavanaugh's challenging book 'Torture and Eucharist' which I have recently started reading. This year I'm employed as a research fellow, working on a major project on 'missions and gender' in Australia - so that should make it into my posts as well. Thanks to those of you who have kept visiting this blog, and asked when I would get back to it - hopefully there will be something more regular for you to read from now on!

The Dawk

2006-11-10T14:39:00.000+11:00

'Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject comes from The British Book of Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on the subject of theology.'
Thus begins the literary critic Terry Eagleton's recent review of Richard Dawkins' latest book, The God Delusion. If you have somehow managed to miss it, it's well worth a read.

detective fiction

2006-11-09T08:58:00.000+11:00

I've guest posted on my top ten detective fiction must-reads over at faith and theology . Writing the list was a lot of fun, but took ages because I kept stopping to re-read old favorites!

Gaudy Night

2006-11-01T14:39:00.000+11:00

I have been re-reading one of my favorite novels of all time, Gaudy Night, by Dorothy L Sayers. Dorothy was a terrible old snob, and her portrayal of porters, maids and valets is teeth-grittingly condescending, but I am, nonetheless, always delighted by this book. It paints Oxford in unforgettably golden tones, and makes one long to punt, stroll the college gardens, quote John Donne and dine at High Table. And if you have followed the encounters of Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane through the previous novels of the series, nothing is more satisfying than the last page of Gaudy Night. Crime, romance, comedy and philosophy - it's all here!
For those of us who hang out at both universities and churches, this is the bit where Harriet goes to church:
'Here was the great Anglican compromise at its most soothing and ceremonial. The solemn procession of doctors in hood and habit; the Vice Chancellor bowing to the preacher, and the beadles tripping before them; the throng of black gowns and hte decorous gaiety of the summer-froocked wives of dons; the hymns and the bidding-prayer; the gowned and hooded preacher austere in cassock and bands; the quiet discourse delivered in a thin, clear, scholarly voice, and dealing gently with the relations of the Christian philosophy to atomic physics. Here were the Universities and the Church of England kissing one another in righteousness and peace, like the angels in a Botticelli Nativity; very exquisitely robed, very cheerful in a serious kind of way, a little mannered, a little conscious of their fine mutual courtesy. Here, without any heat, they could discuss their common problem, agreeing pleasantly, or pleasantly disagreeing to differ. Of the grotesque and ugly devil-shapes sprawling at the foot of the picture, these angels had no word to say.'

avoidance

2006-09-29T09:04:00.000+10:00

This may not mean very much to those of you who are unaware of the feverish excitement that surrounds Australian Rules football in Melbourne, but:
Every year, as a matter of personal amusement, I make it my aim to try not to know which teams are in the Grand Final. Initially, this is not too difficult - just a matter of being generally ignorant about the teams and their progress. As the season progresses, however, and particularly as the Grand Final approaches, it becomes increasingly challenging. I have to politely excuse myself from conversations, avoid certain sections of the newspaper, listen to my iPod on the tram. Last year I succeeded, this year I unintentionally discovered that the Sydney Swans were once again on the menu. But I've got about 24 hours to not find out who the second team is. The pressure is on, and I'm seriously considering skipping the departmental coffee break, as way too dangerous. I mean, there are people here writing their PhDs on Aussie Rules!

Hallelujah! Get happy!

2006-09-20T08:49:00.000+10:00

Less than two months since I submitted my thesis, and the examiners' reports are back! The two eminent scholars (whose sandals I am not worthy to untie) who read the thesis did their job thoroughly. A nice balance of compliments and criticism: they unerringly identified the methodological flaw at the heart of the work, which had bothered me from the beginning - I still don't know how to fix it! Overall they were both enthusiastic, and passed it without amendment. I just have to bind it, hand it in, and wait for the letter that proclaims me 'all but degree'! And decide whether I want to try and turn it into a book (which, as both examiners said, would require a fair bit of reframing. It's a slippery little sucker!)
So sincere thanks to those of you who've seen me through this! There will be a party, and you're all invited.

string thing

2006-09-07T08:43:00.000+10:00

Were a genie to appear and offer me three wishes, I would ask (having dealt first with world peace and church unity) whether I could please be given a proficiency in playing the banjo. I've never even picked one up, but there is something about the combination of rhythm and whine in banjo music that I find deeply endearing. Five albums that I am currently listening to on my iPod make good use of those qualities. In no particular order, I recommend:

40 Days (The Wailin' Jennys)
Blue Horse (Be-Good Tanyas)
Illinois (Sufjan Stevens)
O Brother Where art Thou? (Various)
Why should the fire die? (Nickel Creek)

Toe-tapping good!

Bebbington visit

2006-08-24T08:47:00.000+10:00

If you're in or around Melbourne next week, you might like to come along to this mini-conference that I'm organising, which kicks off with a paper from David Bebbington, godfather of British evangelical history:

'Fanaticism and Sound Learning: Primitive Methodist Revival in County Durham in 1851'
David Bebbington, University of Stirling
1-2pm, Tuesday, 29th August
Jessie Webb Library, Dept of History, University of Melbourne

Followed by a seminar on 'Religion in the Modern World', 2 - 5.30pm.
Members of the Department will present papers on their own research into the historical place of religion in the modern world. After the seminar, all are invited to dinner at a restaurant on Lygon St.

Organising this seminar (and writing a paper for it) is one of the things keeping me too busy to blog!

worse and worse

2006-08-10T08:45:00.000+10:00

I certainly don't think there are any simple answers to what's going on in the Middle East at the moment, but one thing I'm sure of: this doesn't help at all.

synopsis

2006-08-01T10:00:00.000+10:00

So, anyway, I wrote this thesis and submitted it, but I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it was about. Is that a bad sign? (Can I just note that after I handed in my thesis, Andrew gave me a card, in which he congratulated me and added 'In this regard, I have always thought it important that my wife submit.') I've written a synopsis for the purpose of applying for postdocs, which goes like this:

This thesis examines the construction of suffering in early English Methodism, with particular reference to the hymns of Charles Wesley, co-founder of the movement. Wesley wrote thousands of hymns, many of which focus on the experience of overwhelming pain. As eighteenth-century men and women sang or read these hymns, they were encouraged to adopt a distinctive approach to suffering, one which drew upon long-standing elements in Christian tradition, as well as new patterns in English culture. Identifying the construction of suffering in the hymns illuminates the culture of early Methodism and its complex relationship to its eighteenth-century English context.
My analysis places the hymns within the broader 'narrative culture' of early Methodism, which encouraged individuals to interpret their lives and experiences as part of a story of great spiritual significance. The hymns engaged men and women with a spiritual drama of conviction, conversion, sanctification and heavenly reward. Suffering was central to Wesley's depiction of this drama. I examine his construction of the suffering of Christ, the suffering of Christians, and Christian responses to the suffering of others, demonstrating that each of these had an important place in his portrayal of the normative Christian experience. Those who read or sang the hymns were encouraged to embrace suffering as an experience that offered opportunities for intimacy with, and imitation of, Christ.
Recognising Wesley's construction of suffering does not explain exactly how Methodist men and women responded to affliction, but it does illuminate these responses. The letters and journals of Methodist men and women reveal that not all early Methodists adopted Wesley's construction of suffering. The broad contours of his construction are, however, reflected in early Methodist attitudes to affliction. This construction of suffering helps explain some distinctive aspects of early Methodist culture, in particular the role of women in the movement, the intensity of early Methodist fellowship and the involvement of Methodists in social reform.

Does that make any kind of sense to the general reader?

book meme

2006-07-28T10:27:00.000+10:00

Ben has come up with a meme about books... I've tagged a few people below, but I'd love to hear anyone else's responses, too!

1. One book that changed your life.

Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

2. One book you've read more than once

Joan Aiken, Wolves of Willoughby Chase
(at least fifteen times before I was 12!)

3. One book you'd want on a desert island

Psalms

4. One book that made you laugh

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

5. One book that made you cry

Primo Levi, If This is a Man

6. One book you wish had been written

Jurgen Habermas, The Simple Version

7. One book you wish had never been written

The Scofield Reference Bible
(just the reference bits, obviously!)

8. One book you're currently reading

Asa Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 1783 - 1867

9. One book you've been meaning to read

William Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination

10. Tag five people:

Greg
Simone
Simon
Stephen

No Presbyterians, No Machines

2006-07-25T17:28:00.000+10:00

... was the slogan of a group of Luddite campaigners in the North of England during the industrial revolution. I mentioned it to my mother, and she said it sounded like the perfect world. I think (given that she's a Presbyterian minister's wife) that she was joking. But the slogan is evidence, once again, of how intertwined religious and social change are in British history. Why were Presbyterians and machines associated? Because if you were a dissenter from the Church of England, you were barred from almost every means of advancing yourself except through business and industry. In addition, because dissenters were not allowed to attend Cambridge or Oxford, they got a much more practical and thorough education through their own academies, which were more open to new science and technology. In particular, the Scots (who were mainly Presbyterians) had a far superior education system to the English. So many of the inventors, businessmen and industrialists at the forefront of industrialisation were dissenters.
It is because of this kind of connection that I am going to spend much of my first few weeks of tutoring explaining basic elements of Christian doctrine and church structure to my students. That, and the fact that I'm on much safer ground there than trying to explain how the spinning jenny worked!

all done bar the waiting

2006-07-24T08:43:00.000+10:00

Yes indeedy, the thesis is in. The forms have been signed, the champagne has been drunk, the celebratory balloon has been received (a Melbourne Uni tradition). After three and a half years working on this project, I feel like someone who has just done something incredibly risky - presented my work to senior scholars for their merciless scrutiny - WHAT WAS I THINKING???
And now: semester has begun, I start tutoring today, I have post-docs and jobs for which to apply, articles to write, publishers to contact, seminars to organise.... and plenty of blogging to catch up on! I'm looking forward to it all.

taking a break

2006-04-28T11:24:00.000+10:00

Well, as the silence might indicate, I have been very busy. It's three months until my thesis submission date and I have got to the point where I'm waking up in the middle of the night thinking about chapter four. (At present I feel as though chapter four will haunt me for the rest of my days, but I hope that's just paranoia). In addition, a colleague and I have been given the opportunity to develop and teach at least one (hopefully two) British history subjects in our department next year. Very exciting, given that neither of us has actually received our doctorates yet, but it's meant a flurry of work preparing course outlines. In short, I haven't had the time or energy for blogging and I think until the thesis is submitted that's unlikely to change. So I'll be dropping in occasionally, but not posting much. I hope to get back into it in August - until then, thanks so much for reading!

perils of an ipod (or 'from the sublime to the ridiculous')

2006-04-20T08:31:00.000+10:00

Can I just ask: is there anything more ridiculous than a 31-year-old, middle-class white woman standing in a train carriage jam-packed with commuters, jutting her chin and tapping her toe while repeatedly mouthing the words 'Jesus walks'?
I think not. And yet, when it comes to this song, I simply cannot help myself. My fellow-passengers should just be relieved that I have so far resisted the urge to actually start rapping. 'Y'll know what the midwest is?/ The young and restless - the restless/ Might snatch your neckless/ Next day - they'll jack your Lexus'. I save that for the shower.

Song of Songs (6): Resurrection

2006-04-18T08:52:00.000+10:00

Christ has died.
Christ has risen.
Christ will come again.

Reflecting on the resurrection over the weekend, I realise that the connection between eros and Easter is an important one. We listened to a series of talks by N.T. Wright on Sunday afternoon, which brought this home to me. The bodily resurrection, rightly understood, is the sign of God's lasting commitment to what he has made. He will not simply destroy this creation: he is recreating it, and one day he will bring that recreation to completeness. God's commitment to creation is why this body and its desires and its experiences matter. It's why gender and sex matter. It's why eros is God's good gift, not simply the meaningless impulse of flesh that has nothing to do with the important matters of spirit. It's why sexual abuse is so deeply and agonisingly destructive to people and an abomination to God. It's why we cannot simply say (much as I would like to!) that with all the poverty and injustice in this world, who cares what people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms? The resurrection means that God cares. This is not to say that the state should regulate sexual practice as it does taxes or traffic. It is to say that we come to God as whole people and as whole communities: our eating, our drinking, our sexual desires, our shopping, the thoughts and inspirations of our hearts, our treatment of the poor, the art we create and the books we read and write. God is committed to it all, and this is the context in which he builds his kingdom. And perhaps this is the insight to which the Song points when it recognises how profoundly and how powerfully love can move a person:

"Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned." (Song 8: 6-7)

Song of Songs (5): the Pope and the Song

2006-04-13T09:16:00.000+10:00

Given that Benedict XVI and I are such chums, it's not surprising that he too should have been giving the Song some thought in recent months. In his first papal encyclical, the Pope explores the idea of God's love. In the process, he deals with the question of the relationship between eros (which he variously defines as 'worldly', 'possessive' or 'ascending' love) and agape ('love grounded in... faith', 'oblative' or 'descending' love). The Pope argues strongly that the biblical tradition affirms the value of eros, but he condemns any use of sex that demeans the body or turns it into just another product to be consumed. Eros has the potential to lead men and women to an unselfish love, towards 'the Divine' - but only through 'a path of ascent, renunciation, purification and healing'. And this is where he turns his attention to the Song:

"Concretely, what does this path of ascent and purification entail? How might love be experienced so that it can fully realize its human and divine promise? Here we can find a first, important indication in the Song of Songs, an Old Testament book well known to the mystics. According to the interpretation generally held today, the poems contained in this book were originally love-songs, perhaps intended for a Jewish wedding feast and meant to exalt conjugal love. In this context it is highly instructive to note that in the course of the book two different Hebrew words are used to indicate “love”. First there is the word dodim, a plural form suggesting a love that is still insecure, indeterminate and searching. This comes to be replaced by the word ahabà, which the Greek version of the Old Testament translates with the similar-sounding agape, which, as we have seen, becomes the typical expression for the biblical notion of love. By contrast with an indeterminate, “searching” love, this word expresses the experience of a love which involves a real discovery of the other, moving beyond the selfish character that prevailed earlier. Love now becomes concern and care for the other. No longer is it self-seeking, a sinking in the intoxication of happiness; instead it seeks the good of the beloved: it becomes renunciation and it is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice."

This is a thoughtful attempt to give eros an honoured place in Christian theology and experience. Two of the many responses to the encyclical, one positive from the theologian John Milbank, another less so from an Anglican priest here in Melbourne, suggest that the church is ready to hear a lot more discussion about the rightful place of eros.

Song of Songs (4): Actually singing it.

2006-04-07T08:55:00.000+10:00

Here's a tough question: what do we do with the Song of Songs in the modern church? The problem, I think, is that it creates a clash of categories for us. In the modern church, we sing together, about stuff in which we have some kind of communal investment. Even when our songs are individual ('I just really want to praise you' style) they represent topics and sentiments that are communal, public. In the modern church, sexual desire is not really a 'together' topic: it's deeply private. I feel resentment at being asked to sing 'I feel like dancing' in church, but I would feel intense embarrassment about being asked to sing 'Shall I climb that palm and take hold of the boughs?' in church. Not to mention the pastoral issues involved in singing of the sweetness of sexual desire for those for whom this desire is a matter of agony.
A friend and relation of mine, whom I will call Simone (because that's her name) suggests that the Song works best as a kind of pop music - for performance, not communal singing. She's used the Song as the inspiration for lyrics that could be sung as a solo performance, in 'pop' style. I reproduce it here: she'd happily receive any comments or suggestions!

kiss me, kiss me

1. My lover like no other,
A pear tree in the forest,
My joy to sit in his shelter,
His fruit is sweet, sweet to my taste.

Lay me down among your foliage,
Cover me with love, your banner, your flag,
Strengthen me with fruit for I, I am fev'rish
Revive my flesh for I am faint.

Kiss me, kiss me,
Fill me up
Delight my senses with your touch,
Kiss me, kiss me,
Soar above
I'm drunk on your fragrance
and your wonderful love.

2. My lover wants no other,
My vineyard his desire
Come see the buds that have blossomed
The flowers opened; they're in bloom

Come, come with me now, beloved
As you touch my hand, my pulse rises above
Open up your lips, your mouth to my sweetness
Drink the new wine of my love.

Kiss me, kiss me,
Fill me up
Delight my senses with your touch,
Kiss me, kiss me,
Soar above
I'm drunk on your fragrance
and your wonderful love.

Bridge:
I am a garden locked up,
My springs, my fruits are enclosed
But now I give you the key,
My lover coming to me
His left hand under my head,
His right hand holding me close.

Kiss me, kiss me,
Fill me up
Delight my senses with your touch,
Kiss me, kiss me,
Soar above
I'm drunk on your fragrance
and your wonderful love.

Song of Songs (3): movies and marriage

2006-04-04T09:37:00.000+10:00

O for your kiss! For your love
More enticing than wine,
For your scent and sweet name -
For all this they love you.

Take me away to your room,
Like a king to his rooms -
We'll rejoice there with wine.
No wonder they love you!

(Poem 1, in Marcia Falk's translation of The Song of Songs)

Of all the places you might expect to hear a bit of the Song of Songs, a rather black British comedy starring Rowan Atkinson would probably not be one of them. In the recent film Keeping Mum, however, the Song has an important role to play. The film itself is an odd mixture, combining black humour and some rather disturbing sub-plots with a quite profound story about a struggling marriage. There's an unevenness about it that reminds me of Love Actually, which managed to place a series of rom-com stories ranging from the frothy to the outrageous, next to a searingly honest and powerful story of a marriage betrayed.
Keeping Mum tells the story of the Reverend Walter Goodfellow, a rather ineffectual parish priest, trying to manage the endless tasks of ministry alongside a family that's wilting because of his neglect. His son is being bullied, his daughter is sleeping her way through a succession of boyfriends, and his wife Gloria (Kristen Scott Thomas, magnificent as always) is being seduced by the local golf coach (played by Patrick Swayze, who was born to play sleazy Americans!). Into their lives comes a new housekeeper Grace Hawkins, who immediately begins to transform their lives, through fair means and foul. Bodies pile up, self-discovery and the revelation of secrets ensues.
Apart from the rather clever play with names (Goodfellow, Gloria, Grace) the thing I really liked about this movie was the way it dealt with Walter and Gloria's marriage. It is on the rocks: Walter is obsessed with his parish and his sermon-writing: he is trying to be everything to everyone and failing miserably. Gloria, who married Walter because she recognised that he was different and special, is starved for attention and desperate for an escape from the stultifying world of the village. Grace engineers a solution, and in part it involves the Song. She encourages Walter to read the Song, brushing aside his suggestion that its an allegory of divine love. 'The Bible is full of sex!' she exclaims. In a beautiful scene, Walter reads the Song, while watching his wife prepare for bed. When I say that this scene makes Rowan Atkinson an extremely desirable man, fans of Mr Bean will appreciate the power of the Song!
In one sense, this is quite a conventional use of the Song: it expresses desire within the sanctioned context of marriage. Reading the Song itself, it's quite clear that the Song is not primarily about marriage, but about erotic desire. The Song assumes that this desire is connected to marriage (though not necessarily monogamous marriage, given the references to Solomon's concubines), but the language is of 'my bride', not 'my wife'. On the surface, the Song is about youth, beauty and honeymoons, not about a middle-aged vicar and his cardigan-wearing wife. But I think the insight of the movie is that this idealised depiction of youthful love among the pomegranates is also fittingly read within a tried and tested sexual relationship. In that context the Song points to the possibility of a continual rediscovery of desire, to the sudden recognition of the beauty of the other, and to the love 'stronger than death' that fuels these encounters. Against this background, the frantic promiscuity of the Goodfellows' beautiful daughter is clearly seen to have little to do with love or desire of such depth.

Song of Songs (2): a little hymn and a little history

2006-03-31T08:38:00.000+11:00

Song of Songs doesn't get a whole lot of air time in the churches I've been to. And for a text that's identified as a 'song', it doesn't get sung much. The one exception I can think of is a chorus we used to sing in Sunday School, 'His banner over me is love'. For which I still have a soft spot! Historically, however, there have been a few attempts to make the Song 'singable' - one of the few is by the godfather of hymn-writing, Charles Wesley.
Let me start with a little context for this hymn. It comes from a series of hymnbooks that Charles Wesley published in the mid-eighteenth century, entitled 'Short Hymns on Select Passages of Holy Scripture'. Together, these hymnbooks make up a kind of poetic commentary on the whole of Scripture. They include 21 hymns on the Song of Songs. The following is the first hymn in the series (the title indicates which verse Wesley is responding to).

'The song of songs, which is Solomons - i. I.
1. Hence ye profane! far off remove
Ye strangers to redeeming love,
Sinners, who Jesus never knew,
The song of songs is not for you!
Away ye worldly goats and swine,
Who trample on this pearl Divine,
Which only wisdom's sons esteem,
While fools and infidels blaspheme.

2. With deepest shame, with humblest fear,
I to Thine oracle draw near,
To meet Thee in the holiest place,
To learn the secret of Thy grace:
Now, Lord, explain the mystery,
Display Thy precious self to me,
And when Thou dost the veil remove,
My heart shall sing the song of love.

3. Thou heavenly Solomon Divine,
To teach the song of songs is Thine,
Thy Spirit alone the depths reveals,
Opens the book, and breaks the seals:
O might I find the bar removed,
And love my Lord as I am loved,
This moment gain my heart's desire,
The next within Thine arms expire!

What I find most interesting about this hymn is the tension about the text that it communicates. Anxiety that it will be misunderstood by 'the profane' (presumably those unbelievers who read the Song as a poem about human sexual experience), but also concern that it will be unintelligible to the believer. It is a text that must be approached 'With deepest shame, with humblest fear'; the language of veils, depths, seals and bars suggests that its meanings are hidden. Even when understood as an allegory, the use of the erotic as a metaphor is one that Wesley clearly experiences as dangerous.
Wesley's hymn certainly supports my overall suggestion that Song of Songs has historically been seen as a disruptive text. Why? Well, plenty of other people have written about the historical and theological reasons that Christians have worried about sex. In the Methodist context, though, I think the erotic is particularly dangerous because it's a threat to self-control. Early Methodists placed a very high value on the mastery of one's own body and emotions. Sex was one of the greatest challenges to that mastery (the other, I would argue, was suffering). How frightening, then, to read a text that deliberately describes and evokes sexual desire. And how important to begin any reading with a strong denunciation of 'profane' interpretations and with an attitude of 'shame' and 'fear'.

The Song of Songs (1): Disruption

2006-03-30T15:07:00.000+11:00

My dove
in the clefts
of the rocks
the secret
of steep ravines

Come let me look at you
Come let me hear you

Your voice clear as water
Your beautiful body

Poem 10 in Marcia Falk's translation of The Song of Songs.

In reflecting on the Song of Songs over the next week, I am responding to my own experience of the book as disruptive. Read as a description of erotic love (particularly in careful and evocative translations such as Marcia Falk's) it is a book that sits profoundly uncomfortably within traditional Christian ideas about sex (and, to a lesser extent, gender). This is made obvious by the almost 2000 years of allegorical interpretation that Christians have developed, in which the poem(s) becomes an extended description of the relationship between the human soul and the divine lover.

In being disruptive, I think the Song fits well with other texts that are characterised as 'wisdom literature'. My own experience of teaching and studying Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes with evangelicals is that they are each experienced as problematic. I well remember the anxiety created in a bible study group I was leading over the question: 'In what sense are biblical proverbs true?' More dramatically, Job offers no easy answers to the problem of suffering and Ecclesiastes is an almost unrelentingly bleak vision of human experience. The attempt to summarise these books within a simplistic system (eg. Ecclesiastes is the viewpoint of a person who doesn't know Yahweh; Job provides a watertight theodicy; the Song is about the delights of conjugal love) does violence to the complexity of the texts and, I assume, to their purpose.

Modern scholars like myself delight in disruption and tension, and it's possible to just embrace these texts as overturning any attempt at systematic theology. But the anxieties these books create do reflect real pastoral issues that any Christian should be deeply concerned over. For example, simply celebrating the erotic adventures of the characters in the Song as a vindication of wholehearted sexual expression may insensitively ignore the agonies, longings, humiliations and doubts that bedevil most people's experience of sexual desire in this life.

So this week, I don't plan to explain the text, or preach it, or simply ogle it. Rather, I want to sit with it for a while. In particular, I want to reflect on a number of responses to the text and the issues it raises - in a movie, in a hymn, in a modern song, in Marcia Falk's amazing translation, perhaps even in a papal encyclical! And also, I hope the responses of those of you who continue to read my ramblings.

Tomorrow: an eighteenth-century hymn on the Song.

sex and spirit: a week on song of songs

2006-03-28T17:11:00.000+11:00

Well, I am taking my courage in both hands and preparing to start a week of blogging on that fascinating biblical text, the Song of Songs. I'm not planning anything like a systematic theological discussion, rather a series of responses (including some historical stuff, a movie review and some modern lyrics) that represent different angles on the text. I hope to start tomorrow or the next day, and I'd certainly appreciate your company as I step into dangerous territory!

justice and beauty

2006-03-27T09:14:00.000+11:00

On Friday night we went to hear N T Wright speak on 'Justice and Beauty'. It was a talk clearly aimed at a general (Christian) audience, rather than a rigorous theological exploration, but good nonetheless. Below is a skeleton outline of his talk...

Wright began by discussing human longings for justice and beauty, and the way that these longings have been explained and responded to in major philosophical and religious traditions. He identified three basic philosophical responses to the desire for justice (and beauty):
- the desire for justice (or beauty) is simply a projection of childish fantasies; there is no such thing as absolute justice (or beauty) and maturity requires us to accept that.
- the desire for justice (or beauty) is a sign of a perfect world which has no relation to this one
- the desire for justice (or beauty) is a call from a person who is committed to bringing true justice to the world.
He differentiated justice from beauty more strongly than I have, but it will do for a summary!

He then suggested that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is the way God begins his transformation of this world into a place of perfect justice and beauty. The resurrection is particularly important in this regard, because it means that there is continuity between this creation and the new creation. If God is committed to the transformation of this creation, then we must not simply see ourselves as killing time here, waiting for another, perfect world. Instead we need to be part of God's work in this world, which has been begun through Jesus' death and resurrection, is continued in the world now, and will be completed when Jesus comes again.

In regard to justice and beauty, we (Christians) need to consider two questions:
1. how can we implement God's justice?
[From my notes]: A commitment to justice is part of recognising the meaning of the resurrection. The resurrection is revolutionary (here he compared the politically active Pharisees and the politically quietist Sadducees). Christians have gone to two extremes in regard to justice:
- seeing preaching the gospel as the only really significant task for Christians, with 'bandaid' charity as a response to justice issues
- trying to bring in the kingdom here and now by our own efforts (trying to pull the world up by its bootstraps!)
Instead, we need to demonstrate a commitment to justice while understanding the framework of God's work in the world. Wright said he wanted to go on the record as saying that the international economic imbalance was the biggest justice issue for Christians today and we must be involved in debt relief and other measure that will address these inequalities.
2. how can we celebrate God's beauty?
[straight from notes again] Beautiful things are more beautiful when you know the beautiful purposes they are made for. eg. a violin
Christians need to see art not as an 'extra' in life, but as an integral part of responding to God's world. To continue to affirm that there is beauty in the world is to testify that it is God's world. We need to avoid the extremes of sentimentalism and brutalism, both of which deny the realities of life. In the question time he gave some examples of art that manages to avoid these extremes, both among Christians and others. Interestingly, most of the questions were about beauty, whereas I would have liked to ask about justice... I'll collect my thoughts and blog about that soon.

the archbishop on history

2006-03-23T18:03:00.000+11:00

[T]he very effort to make any kind of historical narrative can be seen as a sort of act of faith, faith that massive disruption does not in fact destroy the possibilities of understanding, and thus the possibility of a shared world across gulfs of difference... this also helps us see why for a Christian the writing of history is bound to be theological in some ways. It is not that considerations of doctrine decide the results of research; God forbid. But the possibility of telling a consistent or coherent story about how God's people have lived is inescapably, for the believer, the possibility of seeing two fundamental theological points. God's self-consistency is to be relied on (ie. God is not at the mercy of historical chance and change); and thus relation to God can be the foundation of a human community unrestricted by time or space, by language or cultural difference.

Rowan Williams, 'Why Study the Past', p.22.

made me laugh

2006-03-21T15:00:00.000+11:00

On the weekend, Andrew and I drove to my parents' place and had to stop at a set of traffic lights just around the corner from their house. The lights were red for an incredibly long time, so we sat and waited, and waited, and waited. After a few minutes of this, Andrew sighed impatiently and said, 'OK, now I am officially bawdy'.

holy terror

2006-03-21T14:29:00.000+11:00

It's been a full couple of weeks - writing, teaching, avoiding the Commonwealth Games and visiting our families up north for a wedding. All good stuff, but not very conducive to blogging. One interesting little kerfuffle I would have liked to comment on, was the debate over the Crusades that blew up in The Australian newspaper. Particularly interesting to me at present, as I've just been discussing the Crusades in the church history tutorial I run. The newspaper reported that a history text being used in some Australian schools draws a comparison between the Islamic terrorists who destroyed the Twin Towers and the twelfth century Crusaders. Now that comparison may be useful in exploring us-and-them assumptions in high schoolers, but it is entirely weak from a historical viewpoint - it ignores the development of strategies of terror as a means of waging war over the past hundred years or so. I was fascinated, however, by the response to this article, which was to debate the merits of the Crusades. A number of senior scholars came out to defend the Crusaders (see the article linked above) and The Australian also published an editorial defending them. I'm amazed at the extent to which this twelfth-century European Catholic escapade is still clearly part of 'our' conscious history, with all these emotive connotations!

religious worlds

2006-03-10T08:59:00.000+11:00

I've been reading Robert Orsi on the weaknesses of religious studies as a discipline:

"Any approach to religion that foregrounds ehtical issues as these are now embedded in the discipline obstructs our understanding of religious idioms because religion at its root has nothing to do with morality. Religion does not make the world better to live in (although some forms of religious practice might); religion does not necessarily comform to the credal formulations and doctrinal limits developed by cultured and circumspect theologians, church leaders, or ethicists; religon does not unambiguously orient people toward social justice. Particular religious idioms can do all of these things. The religious motivated civil rights movement is a good example of a social impulse rooted in an evangelical faith and dedicated to a more decent life for men and women. But however much we may love this movement and however much we may prefer to teach it (as opposed to the "cultic" faith of Jonewtown or the "magical" beliefs of "popular" religion) this is not the paradigm for religion, nor is it the expression of religion at some idealized best. There is a quality to the religious imagination that blurs distinctions, obliterates boundaries - especially the boundaries we have so long and so carefully erected within the discipline - and this can, and often does, contribute to social and domestic violence, not peace. Religion is often enough cruel and dangerous, and the same impulses that result in a special kind of compassion also lead to destruction, often among the same people at the same time. Theories of religion have largely served as a protection against such truths about religion."

Robert A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them, 191.

Oscars

2006-03-07T08:46:00.000+11:00

I watched a bit of the Oscars last night. I've only watched them once before, and I hadn't remembered them being quite such an exercise in self-congratulation. Certainly, the line-up of contenders this year (movies like Goodnight and Goodluck, Syriana, Brokeback Mountain, Transamerica, North Country) tackle some significant issues in courageous ways. But the general tone of the evening seemed to be 'aren't we all so politically subversive, socially aware and culturally progressive'. This is Hollywood we're talking about! The MC, Jon Stewart from The Daily Show, seemed to be the only person questioning this self-indulgent perspective. My favorite moment was when he commented on Charlize Theron's role in North Country: he quipped that after making a movie about a world where women were judged on the basis of their looks and paid significantly less than men, it must be a real relief to leave that world behind and get back to Hollywood. You could have heard a pin drop - not a snicker to be heard! Message to Jon: it's all very well criticising those bigots in Wyoming, chauvinists in middle America or corrupt politicians in Washington, but not pointing out a few obvious home truths!

N T Wright

2006-03-06T09:46:00.000+11:00

OK, this I am very excited about!

N T Wrights Visit to Melbourne:

Renowned New Testament scholar N T Wright is visiting Melbourne 23-26 March 2006.

Teaching Nights (7.30-9.30pm)

Hawthorn Town Hall, 360 Burwood Road, Hawthorn

Thursday 23rd March 2006

Evil & the justice of God.

Friday 24th March 2006

Beauty & Justice - using the arts to rethink & re-express the Christian faith in a postmodern world.

Seminar (10am - 4pm)

Friday 24th March 2006

Rethinking Resurrection: Hope for the world & for now

the cross and the crown

2006-03-03T14:56:00.000+11:00

One of the most influential historical 'takes' on early Methodism was that offered by E.P. Thompson in his book 'The Making of the English Working Class'. Thompson was a Methodist minister's son and a Marxist, and he offered a compelling and (in many ways) insightful portrayal of nineteenth-century Methodism that was almost entirely hostile. Methodism, he argued, was the method by which the English working class was transformed into a docile industrial workforce. Methodism taught the English poor that life was crucifixion, and that disciplined work was the path to salvation. Thompson used the memorable phrase 'psychic masturbation' to describe the outpourings of emotion at Methodist meetings: these 'Sabbath orgasms of feeling' were the result of a week-long repression of all normal emotion in the disciplines of work.
Now Thompson was wrong about a lot of things, but he was right about the 'life as crucifixion' bit. His main argument is based on Charles Wesley's hymns, which do encourage Methodists to believe that suffering is the only path to sanctification, and so Christian life will be a pattern of cross followed by heavenly crown. In the chapter I've just rewritten, I've been assessing Thompson's argument from a number of angles: was he right about the message of the hymns, do they represent broader Methodist opinion, and did the construction of life as crucifixion really lead to political quietism. The answers, for anyone who's interested are yes, not entirely and possibly.
While I agree with Thompson in parts, I am arguing strongly that the 'cross and crown' model of life does not always lead to acceptance of the status quo. In fact, quite the opposite. I end my chapter with the story of Dorothy Ripley, a Methodist woman who sailed from Whitby to America alone in 1801 to campaign against American slavery. Ripley spent the next 30 years working against slavery, crossing the Atlantic nine times, speaking to Congress, confronting angry slaveholders, starting schools for ex-slaves and eventually campaigning for prison reform and the protection of Native American rights. At the beginning of her first journey to America, she wrote in a prayer: 'And if great suffering be my allotment to ally me to thee, let me never shrink from the bitter cup offered in mercy.' For Ripley, the conviction that 'great suffering' was a valuable part of sanctification helped sustain her through the pains and demands of a life of activism.
I've written before about my ambivalence about the history of evangelical activism: often paternalistic and ignorant, doing much harm as well as good. But there is no doubt in my mind that evangelicals have sustained the kind of passionate, difficult, sacrifical activism that they have because of precisely the conviction that Thompson decries. The cross is inevitable but it leads to the crown. While writing this chapter I had my argument confirmed by a quote from Charles Marsh's book about faith-based activism in the US, The Beloved Community. Marsh quotes a Pentecostal activist, working in community development in urban ghettos, who says in regard to Christian unwillingness to work for and with the poor: 'People don't want to accept that the cross comes before the crown'.

relationships

2006-03-03T09:00:00.000+11:00

The Relationships Foundation is an organisation I've been interested in for a while now. They are a 'think and do tank' that starts from the principle that relationships are the most important thing in life. They are therefore interested in promoting good relationships at all levels of society, in families and workplaces, between different social and racial groups, as well as between nations. A big task! They provide training and consultants for organisations and communities trying to think and work more relationally, and have been involved (in the past) in peace negotiations in various trouble spots. If you're interested, check out their website for info, resources and to sign up for their newsletter.

Leviathan

2006-03-01T17:52:00.000+11:00

Andrew and I have just finished reading Boris Akunin's novel Leviathan - another great read from the Russian crime novelist. Leviathan is a variation on the theme of the classic English detective novel - a terrible crime, a set number of possible murderers all on board a gigantic cruise ship, a bumbling French detective, and the dashing Russian diplomat Erast Fandorin on hand to unmask the villain. It's funny and it's clever and the translation is extremely skillful. We recommend!

reverence

2006-02-28T08:49:00.000+11:00

Sunday was the Feast of the Transfiguration, and we had a sermon on reverence at church. In passing, our Reverend reflected on the lack of reverence in the modern world... he lamented the passing of a time when Australians were, by and large, godfearing and reverence towards things like sex and religion was part of the culture.
I've been thinking about the sermon and about the issue of 'reverence'. It seems to me that if it is indeed true that our society is less reverent, there are significant reasons for that. For most westerners at the end of the twentieth century, it might seem fairly obvious that reverence is a dangerous attitude. Reverence towards governments ends up with all your young men dead in wars that have nothing to do with you, reverence towards the church results in a nightmarish plague of abuse, reverence towards sex leaves people ignorant and afraid... and reverence towards God seems to create a culpable blindness that allows such horrors to be perpetuated. For us in the church, shouting at people 'BE MORE REVERENT' doesn't seem like much of a solution. And reverence in itself is surely not what God desires. It's reverence towards God, and God understood in all his grace and goodness.
Surely it's only as we reflect our own reverence for God... in a respect for his world, in a profound valuing of all the people he's made, in a rejection of the false gods of money and power, in persevering at building a community that is made up not just of people like us but of all who confess their need of God's grace, in the constant telling and retelling of the stories he has told us about himself, in a humility about ourselves and our own opinions... surely that's when people will see a reason for reverence.

writing and seduction

2006-02-23T16:48:00.000+11:00

Another thought from the writing masterclass, on writing as a love affair. The speaker suggested that in a book (as opposed to in a thesis) we aim to seduce the reader, to make them fall in love with our voice. This means that the topic of the book is almost an excuse: we want the reader not to love our subject, but to love our 'take' on that subject. We are jealous (in the OT sense of a 'jealous' God!) of our readers' affections and attention, wanting them to be wholly ours. This has particular significance for the way we quote others. In a thesis, we quote others as 'authorities', because we are not presenting ourselves as authoritative. Their voices lend weight to ours. But in a book, we are careful not to allow the voices of others ever distract the reader from our, central, authoritative voice. To use the speaker's example, we would not want someone to sleep with us because we were friends with Kant'. But we might tell a joke about Kant to make ourselves look intelligent and attractive!
Again, I'm beguiled (I should say seduced!) by this analogy. But is writing really such an egotistical activity?

writing and virtue

2006-02-22T08:54:00.000+11:00

I spent yesterday at a masterclass on writing for postgraduates in the humanities. A stimulating day, hearing from a number of academics who write for broader audiences than just those within their field. One of the speakers got me thinking about the importance of hatred in thinking and writing. He argued that (among other motivations) most of us are driven by a hatred of a particular approach to our subject. While this hatred is important and valuable as a motivation, it must not infect our writing, which has to be (his word!) 'lovely'.
Interesting! I realised that I do indeed hate (quite passionately) a particular, long-standing approach to Methodist history which to my mind has flattened an entirely fascinating religious culture into a bland, respectable, deathly boring set of theological propositions. And I am certainly driven by that hatred to write about early Methodism in a way that will somehow rescue it from that fate. The question is, do I embrace that hatred or regard it with suspicion? After all, I don't hate the people who've written the books I detest - I meet them at conferences and they are kind and delightful people. But hatred of an intellectual approach does spawn a lack of respect for people, an arrogance about my own ideas, a sneering attitude towards particular schools of thought. And that doesn't seem very virtuous!

At the tent flap sin crouches.

2006-02-20T09:24:00.000+11:00

I've long been a fan of Robert Alter and his sensitive approach to the biblical texts. His book The Art of Biblical Narrative transformed my understanding of the OT. He has recently published a translation of the Pentateuch - James Woods has an excellent review here. Thanks to Greg for pointing it out!

right to work

2006-02-15T08:55:00.000+11:00

In one of my first entries on this blog, I wrote about my time visiting asylum seekers in detention here in Melbourne. I haven't been out to the detention centre for a while, because there are hardly any asylum seekers kept in detention here anymore - the overall numbers of people in detention have dropped and those who are still in detention are kept well out of the public eye in desert centres.
The situation for those asylum seekers who have been allowed into the community is not great, however. In particular, there are around 7000 people who have been issued a visa called the Bridging Visa E. Under this visa people are not allowed to work and given no access to Medicare. That's right, they have no source of income and no way of paying their bills. If their children get sick, they can't take them to the doctor. I heard of one man who accidentally cut his finger off and didn't go to hospital because he knew he had no way of paying the bill.
These people are entirely dependent on charity. It is an absolutely disgraceful situation. The Uniting Church has begun a campaign to change the conditions of the Bridging Visa. If you're an Australian, please join the campaign. TEAR Australia has information and a letter-writing guide.

beards

2006-02-10T14:06:00.000+11:00

February heralds an influx of PhD students back into the building I work in, prompting the question: is there some kind of deep connection between PhDs and beards? I rarely see a beard away from university, whereas a male postgrad without a beard is notable. And once Andrew and I were at a work dinner for one of the organizations he works with... table after table of cleanshaven men in business suits. Andrew said he'd introduce me to some of the scientists who work for the organization - and there they were, a row of boys with beards. I felt immediately at home.
What's with beards? And is there a female equivalent?

Royal Society

2006-02-10T14:01:00.000+11:00

After reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy, I have the entirely ridiculous notion that I am on intimate terms with the 17th century scientists who were members of the Royal Society (Newton, Wren, Hooke and co.) I'm therefore delighted to see that the Society minutes have been discovered in someone's cupboard.

what I do (and why)

2006-02-09T13:17:00.000+11:00

I recently applied for a writing course and was required to submit a 500 word piece of writing, describing my research in a way that would be accessible to the general (educated) reader. Writing it made me aware of how attached I have become to certain academic norms - it seems sacrilegious to include quotes without footnotes, and I keep feeling the desire to qualify every statement. Here's what I wrote:

The history of human suffering divides naturally into the time before the invention of anasthetics and the time after. We who live in the latter time may find ourselves reluctant to imagine the experience of those who lived without the comfort of relatively effective pain relief. Theirs was a world in which a blow to the head was one of the few possible preparations for surgery; in which toothache drove people to suicide; in which a peaceful death was a rare blessing. Theirs is the world in which I immerse myself, in my study of the experience of suffering in eighteenth-century England.

Consider the description of a mastectomy sent to Charles Wesley, the Methodist revivalist and hymn-writer, in 1758. Entitled 'An account of Mrs Davis' behaviour during the operation of her breast being cut out', it is written by a friend who attended the operation. She writes of Mrs Davis:

'When the inside of her breast was taken out, she asked if they had done cutting. I answered yes, and some thread being called for, she immediately said 'There is some in my work basket on the table'. While they sewed up the blood vessel, she said 'This pain is very great'. She called on the Lord to strengthen her and said 'I'm faint'.'

This account is matter-of-fact in its description of details: the call for thread, the calm instruction by Mrs Davis, the sewing up of the flesh. Reading it, the imagination revolts. How did men and women endure such pain?

The very existence of this account suggests the importance of this question to those who wrote and read this description as well. Charles Wesley and the anonymous woman who composed this account were involved in the Methodist movement. Methodism was a revivalist sect within the Church of England that grew with staggering rapidiy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, becoming in the process an established international denomination. As this account suggests, Methodists took a profound interest in a person's behaviour while in the crucible of physical agony. Mrs Davis's self-control in the face of suffering was evidence of the strength of her faith and so worthy of description to her fellow-Methodists.

In their journals and letters, in their hymns and sermons, Methodists explored the meaning of suffering and the means by which it could be managed and endured. Through reading these texts, I seek to answer the questions that intrigue me. What did suffering mean to Charles Wesley and his fellow Methodists? What shaped their responses to the physical and emotional pains of life? How did they maintain their faith in a loving (if stern) God in the face of horrors such as these? The answers to these questions are not only important for understanding this influential religious movement and the culture within which it developed, but they also provide a historical context within which we can reflect on the hard questions that the experience of suffering continues to provoke.

quote

2006-02-07T09:00:00.000+11:00

'Once during my time teaching in Wesley College, after four terms taking a particular class through the history of the church in the ancient world and the Middle Ages, one of my students asked in despair "But where is the good news in all of this?" It was a fair question, to which I could best reply that all the story was good news. The history of Christianity is frequently sordid and depressing, and very frequently, apparently sacred events turn out to have very secular causes. Christians will remain beginners in their faith if they do not face up to this. The miracle of the church's story is that after all its mistakes, bewildering transformations and entanglements in human bitterness, it is still there'

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Groundwork of Christian History, p 11.

Ultimate Christian Wrestling.

2006-01-31T11:47:00.000+11:00

I kid you not.

Israel

2006-01-30T15:43:00.000+11:00

I went to two church services (at two different churches) on Sunday, and at both I heard prayers about Israel that distressed me. It's not that I worry that God will be swayed by unwise prayers (I certainly give him plenty of practice at resisting ridiculous requests). Evangelical foolishness about Israel continues to do plenty of damage, however, and to see it surfacing among fairly sensible people is alarming. For a good summary of the theological problem, I point you to Faith and Theology. For a jeremiad that I am inclined to agree with, (and which my experience on Sunday confirms), I point you to this post by Myles.
In the meantime, I'm resolving to spend more time praying for peace, which pleases God, who desires that all people be saved.

methodist monday (2)

2006-01-30T14:57:00.000+11:00

Last Monday I commented that my reading of Methodist letters suggested that 'ordinary' people were often theologically aware and engaged. I've just been re-reading a couple of letters from a woman named Sarah Mason, who wrote to the Wesley brothers in the 1740s explaining her theological position. She gives a thorough defense of her moderate Calvinism, and demonstrates a clear understanding of the debates surrounding election. For example:

...though I cannot say I can fully close in [agree] with everything I hear, yet I have reason to bless God that I have heard what i trust has been made of use both for instruction and establishment in the faith once delivered to the saints... As to the doctrine of universal redemption what must I say, methinks Christ did in some sense die for all because the Scripture tells me he tasted death for every man - and that he is the Saviour of all men (but especially of them that believe) - but that he died in the fullest snese for and intentionally to save all the fallen race methinks it cannot be; because how then is it that all are not actually in the fullest sense made partakers of complete and eternal salvation.

She goes on to discuss a number of passages in Mark, and rejects the doctrine of reprobation. In another letter she quotes Hebrews 12:23 to argue that perfection is not possible in this life. She concludes:

The great restorer of all things is not yet come in that way we are waiting for, and it is with pleasure I think of those words, "He restoreth my Soul" (and those "I am the Lord that Healeth thee"). I believe it is through grace, under his healing hand; and that it is not in the power of men, or devils to pluck it thence... and methinks to this sorry, sinful soul of mine, these words are sweetly encouraging.

Again, I think these letters show both a theological awareness and a conviction that theology had significance for daily life. For both Sarah Wesley and Sarah Mason, too, their theological convictions were 'sweetly encouraging' in the face of life's trials.

Indigenous poverty

2006-01-27T08:48:00.000+11:00

To commemorate Australia/Invasion Day (which was yesterday), I'd like to draw attention to the Make Indigenous Poverty History campaign. Many indigenous Australians live in poverty; their children are twice as likely to die in infancy; they suffer higher unemployment and are six times more likely to be murdered than the average Australian. The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ecumenical Commision (NATSIEC) has begun the Make Indigenous Poverty History campaign to draw attention to this apalling state of affairs and bring about meaningful change. Check out their website, and if you're an Australian, get involved.

methodist monday

2006-01-23T14:48:00.000+11:00

I thought I'd blog a little on my research. I've been reading through stacks of unpublished letters, written in the eighteenth century to Charles Wesley, hunting for letters about suffering - sickness, bereavement, persecution, childbirth. It is sad reading, and sometimes it feels morally questionable to be reading letters which share such private thoughts and feelings. And yet it's fascinating to have the opportunity to listen to these long-dead Methodists, to hear how they understood and managed the terrible pains that eighteenth-century life so often brought.

There are hundreds of letters to Charles from his wife Sally. I've been looking in detail at the letter she wrote to inform him that one of their sons had died. She wrote:

My Dearest Mr Wesley,

This comes to acquaint you that our dear little Babe is no more, his agony is over but it was a hard struggle before he could depart, He was dying all yesterday from two o'clock and about 9 last night he departed. He screamed three times about half an hour before he died, that he could be heard from Nurse's Parlour to the other side of the street, not through guilt (that is my comfort) but through extreme pain, perhaps were I of Calvin's opinion I might have attributed it to a different cause, but glory be to a blessed Redeemer's love for declaring (for the consolation of distressed Parents) that "of such is the Kingdom of Heaven". O that I may land as safely in the harbour of eternal Peace...

It's a deeply moving letter. And I am struck that at the most intimate level of this eighteenth-century woman's grief over her dead son, theological debates mattered. So much English history is written as though theology had meaning only for the elites, while 'popular' religion was a matter of superstition and learned ritual. The letters I'm reading suggest that quite complicated theological debates were a matter of genuine and practical concern for the working classes. Where theology dealt with life and death (including who would be saved and how) people took notice.

icons

2006-01-20T13:29:00.000+11:00

I've just signed up for a course on icon painting... something to broaden my Protestant mind (although as my Lutheran friends like to remind me, Luther was keen on icons) and exercise the left side of my brain. This icon by Andrei Rublev has me all inspired...

hurrah!

2006-01-20T12:13:00.000+11:00

I have just finished my rough draft of the final chapter of my thesis! Lots and lots of rewriting to do, but it feels like a milestone passed.

Easter hymn

2006-01-18T12:13:00.000+11:00

I spend my days studying hymns, but my new favorite is the Easter hymn Ben's daughter composed. I also enjoyed the sophisticated theological analysis provided by Ben (though as a cultural historian I would have liked him to pay a little more attention to the cultural function of her composition). Thanks to the tortoise of dissent for pointing it out.

the thesis writer's friend

2006-01-17T09:19:00.000+11:00

The submission date for my thesis is looming, and I am spending much of my time trying to think through difficult theoretical questions that I've avoided for the last three years. My hot tip for this kind of intellectual dilemma is: go swimming! Yesterday I was wrestling with a thorny theoretical problem and took time off for some laps. First ten laps: mind in state of total confusion. Second ten laps: meditative calm. Third ten laps: effective mental effort. Fourth and fifth ten laps: solution to problem emerges as if by magic. This has happened more than once - somehow the repetition and physical effort does wonders for my mind!

and now for something completely different...

2006-01-13T10:12:00.000+11:00

An interview with the Russian detective novelist, 'Boris Akunin'. (yes, that's B.Akunin for the Russian historians among you). I've just been enjoying his book 'The Turkish Gambit', set in nineteenth-century Russia and featuring a rollicking combination of spies, generals, Turks and a 'progressive' Russian heroine. In the interview Akunin talks about the contempt with which Russians regard 'popular fiction'- his mother is still waiting for him to write a 'real' book. And he refuses to do public appearances in Russia because (he says) Russians expect novelists to know the meaning of life. Earnest young men are apparently always asking him whether there's a God! Hm, yes, just like Australia...

Shadowmancer

2006-01-11T15:31:00.000+11:00

Andrew and I have been reading G.P. Taylor's book Shadowmancer to each other. We like to have a good kid's book to get us through the housework (one person reads, one person folds the clothes/washes the dishes/ makes dinner). I know Shadowmancer has had some rave reviews, but frankly I'm disappointed. There's some good stuff about it: the setting (Cornish coast, 18th century) is atmospheric, and the introduction of demons and witchcraft into that gloomy and superstition-ridden context entirely effective. Having a vicar as the villain is a nice touch! But it just seems far too clunkily... Christian. Whole sections of the narration and dialogue are taken straight from the Bible or are oddly tract-like. What we can't work out (given that it seems to have sold really well) is whether it just grates on us because we went to Sunday School. Are there hundreds of kids out there who read a description of the dark lord as 'a prowling lion, seeking to devour you' and think it's a strikingly original image? Perhaps there are!

small is good

2006-01-10T16:44:00.000+11:00

Having visited a small church again this weekend, I am feeling enthusiastic about such congregations. After a busy and emotionally demanding week, walking into a room with 150 people in it produces a strongly negative reaction that I have to get past in order to pay attention to anything. I had forgotten that in small congregations:
You can 'pass the peace' with everyone in the room.
You can talk to the same person you spoke to last week without feeling overwhelmed by how many people you haven't met yet.
Communion doesn't take forever, and the minister has time to chat to the kids about what it all means.
People feel comfortable calling out prayer requests.
As visitors you get lots of attention (and cake)!
You feel as though the minister knows the people to whom he's preaching.

I'll avoid becoming some kind of small-church fanatic (I have met a few!) but at the moment, 30 or so seems a very sensible size for a congregation!