Labor Party: Lindsay Tanner

Sure Lindsay is officially stepping down at this election, but you can’t tell me that the Labor leadership wouldn’t tempt this man to make a run at glory. And Lindsay is one of the best things about the Rudd government: the one member of the “gang of four” you felt could genuinely be trusted and a man who genuinely believes in things and speaks intelligently about why he does so.

Interchange: Penny Wong impressed me on Q and A last night. Mind you I reckon I’d almost take anyn of the Labor politicians without the “faceless back-room hacks”.

Liberal Party: Malcolm Turnbull

Maybe he just feels let off the leash now he’s a glorified back-bencher, but Malcolm was very impressive last night on Q&A. He showed that he actually had vision for the nation that didn’t involve shutting the front door and bagging out the other guy. While I think he got a bit lost in his first attempt at the Liberal Party leadership I’m pretty certain that he wouldn’t take the same crap if he got another go around.

Interchange: Ummmm. Well. Would it be too late to get Fraser back? Perhaps Joe Hockey on a really good day, but it’d be touch and go.

Greens: Christine Milne

Bob Brown is a little past it for my liking, and while I have little doubt the man is passionate he usually comes across as though he’s just watched “How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days” for every day for four months and has completely lost the will to keep his eyes open. Christine Milne in contrast actually composes well constructed arguments in response to the sort of lines that have historically always been used against the Greens (blah blah hippies, blah blah unrealistic, blah blah blah).

Interchange: Do the Greens have anyone else in parliament? Let’s leave this as is.

Democrats (or perhaps just as an independent): Andrew Bartlett

Sure he’s running for the Greens in the House of Reps this year, and the Dems are well and truly dead (buried and cremated?) but Andrew Bartlett is still one of the best thinkers in Aussie politics, and the parliament is much much poorer for his absence. His blog is still worth a read.

That’s my ideal election: at least with the poor standard of politicians we have on offer right at the moment. Feel free to submit your own if you’re the kind of politics nerd who thinks about these things too.

Abbott was worse: even his summation failed to provide any positive policy that wasn’t just a reaction to the Labor party. The sole time he impressed was when he got on the subject of paid parental leave: a position that is surely from the playbook of the other party and a clever attempt to bring some dissatisfied Labor supporters across.

But the saddest part about politics this year and every year for as long as I’ve been allowed to vote is that the migration of about 2000 desperate people a year (in a country who reportedly takes about 300,000 a year) will define how a huge percentage of constituents vote, and will likely decide the election whichever way it goes. It’s the most pathetic issue, and apparently the only way to make it work for you is to see who can possibly be the nastiest.

So I’ll be voting, but certainly not for either of these two disgraceful attempts at political parties, and I’m definitely not happy about having to vote for the guys who will end up with it. Politics is very hard to love these days.

1 John 1:5-9

⁵ This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. ⁶ If we claim to have fellowship with him and yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live out the truth. ⁷ But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all ^[b] sin.

⁸ If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. ⁹ If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. ¹⁰ If we claim we have not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word is not in us.

I had a bit of an Inigo Montoya moment with this one (you know the bit where Vizzini keeps saying “inconceivable” and then after a while Inigo says “I don’t think it means what you think it means). Well I don’t think this means what I thought it meant.

The book of the month for our Missio Dei crew is in actual fact all three of the numbered Johns, so in a moment of procrastinating from writing reports I started reading and didn’t get very far at all before I found something I needed to blurt about. For all my life: whether through poor teaching or (more likely) through theological laziness, I’ve assumed that wherever the Bible talks about “being in light”, I’ve equated that with some form of sin-management style “righteousness”. So being in the light means doing the good things, not doing the things from the dark-side, and mostly just being a nice guy.

But that’s not what I read here when I have another go. Because this does talk about sin, but it talks about says that when you’re in the light you “have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all ^[b] sin.” If “being in the light” was about not sinning then the sentence is farcical: when you don’t sin Jesus purifies you from sin.

Instead, what I’m reading here is closer to this: being “in the light” is about vulnerability with one another. It’s about being real about where we are: not “claiming to be without sin” and making Jesus a liar, but instead opening ourselves up to the harsh reality of light – letting the people you are in fellowship with see who you really are – warts and all.

So maybe this is not a new thing for most people, but I can’t remember hearing this taught on like this. Regardless, this represents a huge challenge for whatever brand of faith community you are a part of: being really honest with one another, genuinely transparent. In a similar vein, I wanted to share something from Pete Rollins’ “Ikon” community who have just done a thing on this theme:

Most of the time when we are with each other we are covered.  We have so much technology now – technology that shrinks the distance between each of us and makes all sorts of new communication possible.  And yet a lot of the time we still feel far apart from each other.  It is almost as if our virtual selves have become just that – almost selves hovering around our lonely and disconnected interiors.  Almost selves covered in the salve of technology bravely telling ourselves that we are showing our real selves for the first time.

But one of the amazing and frustrating things about being a human being is there is always the OTHER and nothing can get rid of it – nothing can span the space, nothing can take away the distance that exists between the OTHER inside and the OTHER in those around us.  That no matter how many beautiful words and liturgies we construct, no matter how warm and inviting the atmosphere we provide, no matter how much we want it that we will always be in a state of lack.

And what happens when we set down our props – our candles, music, multi-media and set pieces.  What happens when we only have our eyes, our ears, our mouths, our guts, our bodies to know each other with?  What happens when we sit down with our lack and the OTHER and try to speak?  What would we say?

PeterRollins.net – Naked

Hope that helps you think, anyway.

1. I can’t watch this video without believing, at least for a moment or two – that this piece of technology would make me a happier, more complete person. It’s a fantastically brilliant piece of advertising.
2. Promises like this feel to me to be an alternate gospel.

In some ways I am sure that the decrease in blogging is just a symptom of trying to keep my head above water in a new profession, and in a new part of the city. But at the same time, I do feel that in some ways my theological musings have not made it quite to the www due to the fact that my theology is starting to become more practical. It’s hard to get all worked up about theological distinctions when you’re desperately wondering what it is you can do to improve the lot of a bunch of kids who in many cases seem to have limited themselves to exactly what they can see around them. So in many ways, while a lot of my “inputs” are theoretical: I’m still reading plenty, still listening to the occasional podcast and still thinking critically about the sermons I hear; my “output” has tended to be focused on “what does that change about what I’m doing?”. Which is a very rose-coloured way of looking at the world, but the glass has to be half full sometimes doesn’t it?

In other aspects of life – Soul Survivor has come and been. This was the first year I’ve been involved at the “steering group” level, which has been both an exciting thing and an exhausting one. The festival takes a lot of hands to put on – and just keeping track of who’s doing what is a huge job. But in the midst of that, I guess a big part of the struggle can be working out exactly how and when (and why) to allow yourself to participate and be “fed” (bah – what a horrible term) at the same time as being on top of as much as you can.

Teaching has been one of the best decisions I’ve made in life. It frustrates me, it wears me out, and it has me desperately wanting to get better – and I wouldn’t give it up for anything. That sense that deep down I’m genuinely participating in something I believe in, and (hopefully) making a difference in the lives of young people is not a difficult choice to believe in. And it fits with me, it fits with who I am. We had the school athletics day yesterday, and I think the best part for me was just kicking the footy for a little bit with some of my year 10s. There are days, but it’s an amazing thing to be contributing to a “big picture” that I really believe in.

And “church life” is starting to feel settled too now. We’re slowly but surely becoming a part of the Missio Dei community in Hurstbridge, and that’s quickly feeling like home (though I must hasten to mention that we don’t “go” there ). The missio crew are an amazing bunch of people – everyone I speak to knows it as “Steve Said’s church” but that moniker is deeply underselling the contribution of a super group of comrades. Fun times.

I promise the next post will be about something other than the inside of my navel – but til then I hope this justifies the blog’s presence on the interweb tubes.

Soul Survivor 2010

We interrupt this complete lack of posts, to remind anyone and everyone that the Soul Survivor Festival is less than a month away, and if you’re in Melbourne-ish between April 7 – 11 you’d be mad not to at least drop by for a couple of days. Plus if you’re registering for the whole time you should get on down to http://soulsurvivor2010.eventbrite.com and register yourself today to save a cool $20. (Unless you’re reading this after the 19th of March, in which case I can’t help you).

And if you’re the sort of person who would be keen to lend a hand here or there, let me know and I’m sure we can find a job for you!

With that in mind, I figured I at least owed a bit of an update with respect to where life is at. We’ve just been away at a Soul Survivor team retreat (tarnished only by the website going down while we were unable to do anything) which was a great time to get to know a heap of the new team members, as well as to refresh spiritually. We really are blessed in Soul Survivor to have such an amazingly talented and committed crew on team.

Teaching is going well – though it has been a roller-coaster. Any available blogging effort has gone to my teacher blog: Son of a Teacher Man. Does certainly feel like I’ve found the place I am meant to be – the classroom must be it for the moment. Ran into some students at the shopping centre on Sunday, which was a weird experience.

The biggest struggle in the past few months has been that it’s crappy for Bec to be looking for work. Nobody likes looking for work, and it’s made the isolation of having moved house a lot tougher for her particularly. But there’s light – Bec’s got a trial doing some web stuff for a stationery crew starting tomorrow so lets hope it all goes well (both for her liking it and them liking her) and maybe that might be the end of the dramas. Who knows.

Regardless – there’s the update.

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

via Official Google Blog: A new approach to China.

While I realise lots of you will have heard this news already, congratulations are in order to Google who have decided that it’s not enough just to say you’re not going to be evil, and are instead doing something about it as well.

• “No pedagogy which is truly liberating can remain distant from the oppressed by treating them as unfortunates and by presenting for their emulation models from among the oppressors”
• “This concept is well suited to the purposes of the oppressors, whose tranquility rests on how well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.”
• “Any situation in which some individuals prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence. The means used are not important; to alienate human beings from their own decision-making is to turn them into objects”
• “When a word is deprived of its dimension of action: reflection automatically suffers as well and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating “blah”. “
• “There is no true word that is not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform the world”

All taken from “The pedagogy of the oppressed”. All inspiring. All distracting me from writing my learning theories essay.

“I’m quite sure I could beat LeBron James in a game of one on one basketball. The game merely needs to feature two special rules: It lasts until I score, and as soon as I score I win. Such a game might last several hours, or even a week or two, and James would probably score hundreds and possibly thousands of points before my ultimate victory, but eventually I’m going to find a way to put the ball in the basket.

Our national government and almost all of the establishment media have decided to play a similar game, which could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts until there are no longer any terrorists, and;
(2) If terrorists manage to ever kill or injure or seriously frighten any Americans, they win.”

Sourced from: Lawyers, Guns and Money: Terrorball

Mulled Wine. Note the mangled lemon and orange pieces

This is normally more of a Bec thing to do – but it’s Christmas so why not have a go. With this year’s Christmas being a relatively chilly one, I decided that our Christmas Eve celebrations should involve my favourite German Christmassy tradition: Glühwein (mulled wine).

Geoff’s Glühwein recipe

• 2 bottles of whatever Red Wine you have lying around
• 1/3 of a bottle of leftover port (also lying around)
• A packet of cinammon quills
• Some brown sugar
• Grated whole nutmeg (much nicer if you can get the whole ones – plus the insides of whole nutmeg looks a lot like brains!)
• Cloves (we didn’t have any whole ones around so it was pre-grated for us)
• Chinese Five Spice (Smells about right)
• A Dash of Orange Juice
• Two Whole Oranges (from our new backyard, Wooo!) – one sliced, the other squeezed for all its juice and mangled
• One Whole Lemon – likewise juiced and mangled
• A (really decent) dash of Cointreau

Directions:

Put everything except the Cointreau together in the saucepan, over a very low heat. Stir until spices and sugar have dissolved. Taste. Add some more of whatever you think is needed, until the harsh edge has been taken off the Red wine. In theory this should take about 5 minutes, but if you’re doing it right it should take about an hour and a half. Enjoy the delicious aroma permeating through the house. Add the Cointreau close to serving time or once you have taken off the heat (don’t want to lose the alcoholability of the liqueur).

Serves best if left for a number of hours to stew in the rind of the citrus and the cinammon sticks, but if not you can probably just serve straight away – nice and hot.

Rich white straight-acting blokes who believe in God, or pretend to, hold a disproportionate amount of the world’s power and have for centuries. It’s not because, as many would like you to believe, it’s a case of ‘we are the best, chuck out the rest’. It’s simply due to circumstance. Class, freedom, money and education are the basis of power. And access to these is almost entirely due to where you were born and to whom. Sexually transmitted hereditary privilege and genitally determined advantage.

via Sexism | discrimination | God | Catherine Deveny.

This quote has been waiting in my draft posts for over a month now, waiting for me to have something valuable to add to it. And like her or hate her (and there are plenty on both sides of that divide), I don’t think that you can really argue that Catherine Deveny is actually wrong here.

Of course if genius-freak children aren’t your thing you could always follow along my teaching adventures over at Son of a Teacher Man.