Saturday Survey
Colliding this week's ideas, news, and some personal interests, with Jesus | Hottest July, purity culture, gambling reforms, Sinead O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and a new City Alight album.
Warmest month on record
We’re on track for the warmest month on record globally. Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary-general, made an alarming claim: “And it is just the beginning. The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”
If the climate change we’re experiencing is irreversible, the world needs solutions for the new normal. In addition to phasing out fossil fuel emissions, we also need innovations for infrastructure, technology, and agriculture. We also need widespread strategies for the mental adjustment, change management help for whole populations and also the imparting of hope. (Is it just me, or is the number of people in despair higher than ever?)
Christianity would push us in two directions. First: love of one’s neighbour (through whatever gifts or expertise or resources we have). Second: by the giving of hope. Jesus is on about hope. So much so, we could say the Biblical storyline is about the imparting of hope. The good thing about Biblical hope is that it can be both honest about reality, and grounded outside of our present circumstances. The key is the two-step movement of the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Purity culture
Until recently, I’ve not engaged enough with the so-called evangelical ‘purity culture’ to understand why it was a bad thing. Purity, after all, is presented as a good thing in the Bible.
But this piece explains how the problems lie in some of the un-biblical assumptions carried with the movement:
If purity culture dehumanized women by treating them as sexual objects, it dehumanized men by casting them as sexual animals. If it hypersexualized women’s bodies, it hypersexualized men’s minds. Much of our rhetoric and resources adopted the culture’s assumption that men are helplessly and hopelessly hypersexual, a belief perpetuated in TV sitcoms and accepted in “locker-room talk.”
A very insightful analysis.
Gambling reforms
Talk about gambling reforms in NSW continues. But it seems to be very difficult for any government to do very much, very quickly. I wonder about the following:
Is it possible for a government which benefits so much from gambling revenue, to make neutral decisions about it?
What alternative sources of revenue are available to the government, if they do decide to phase out much of the problem gambling revenue in NSW?
Sinead O’Connor
Sinead O’Connor who died this week, had a haunting singing voice, which seems to have made her broader activism and protest streak all the more potent.
She spent much of her career showing a lot of anger at systems of abuse—such as when she tore up a picture of the Pope’s face on SNL (and got a lifetime ban from the show).
I’m no expert on her, but it makes me wonder how much she knew of Jesus’ teaching. Sometimes he looked somewhat similar. Mark 12:38-40 is a confronting passage:
“As he taught, Jesus said, “Watch out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honour at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. These men will be punished most severely.”
Often Jesus looks more like Sinead O’Connor on SNL than the ever-positive, ever-agreeable figures we associate with him. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying she preached the mission of Jesus accurately. But Jesus’ kingdom preaching overturned people and institutions that stood in the way of the crowds coming to know God’s grace in its fullness.
Cormac McCarthy
Having read The Road some years ago, I decided to read another McCarthy when he passed away this year, and settled on one of his early, more classically-told novels, ‘All The Pretty Horses’. And parts of it are, well… pretty.
Try this:
“They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.” P.67
Or this:
“The grasslands lay in a deep violet haze and to the west thin flights of waterfowl were moving north before the sunset in the deep red galleries under the cloudbanks like schoolfish in a burning sea and on the foreland plain they saw vaqueros driving cattle before them through a gauze of golden dust.” P.93
The kind of book one needs in an urban centre, to remember the wild, beautiful creation beyond.
New ‘City Alight’ music
Just released from City Alight is ‘Simple Songs for Young and Old’. On an initial run through, it sounds like more gold. I love that they’re bending conventions in favour of doing something Christian, namely—bringing the generations together in church. Often congregational music for kids and adults are poles apart. But they’re mixing things up and the results are God-glorifying, and a solid balm for a globally-warming, impure, politically confused, and abusive world. This approach should be a non-controversial third-way.
From God is over all:
God above all time and space
You are never far away
For in Jesus I can see
How you are a friend to me
What better news, O World, are you waiting for?