Archive for the 'Religion' Category

Guest post by Aaron Darc: Morgan and the Multiplex

Published
by
Guest Poster
3 months, 3 weeks ago
in Consumerism, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, Food, Foreign policy, Life, Masculinity, Relationships, Religion, Sociology, Terrorism, USA, Urbanism and War
. 194 Comments

Aaron Darc, whose work will be familiar to LPers from his incarnation as Eye on Big Brother, recently interviewed film maker Morgan Spurlock. Spurlock came to prominence with Super Size Me and his new film Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? will be released in Australia next week. You can read more of Aaron’s writing at Pop Psychology for Beautiful People.

MORGAN & THE MULTIPLEX

From fat to fatwah, Murgon Spurlock has lost the pounds he gained for his smash-hit, Super Size Me, and hired himself a camel, for his latest film, Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden? I caught up with Morgan, this week, on his press tour of Sydney.

My 20 year old brother, Glenn, lives in a distant galaxy from me, on a planet called Regional Suburbia. He likes football, easy girls and fast cars. His favourite film is The Fast & The Furious; he calls it “wicked sh*t.” It would never have dawned on me, it goes without saying, to peruse my brother’s DVD collection. I knew it would be large, and I knew it would have been entirely purchased at JB Hifi; I know probably more than I should about Revolution Plasma and its disturbing power to appeal to the working and middle classes, and replace what would once have been their lives; draining whatever connection to the real world they had, by offering their unconscious longing to escape, a glistening, mostly poisonous, apple. Here, everybody! Plug into this - you’ll find it… easier. You will have a purpose. You will own that 42″ plasma, even if you f*ck yourself up on credit to do it, and you will build thyself a DVD Tower. There, thy shall easily access The Fast & The Furious; it shall keep the company of Face Off, Rush Hour, the Terminator Trilogy and, but of course, the Die Hard Box Set. Got plasma? check. Got plasma tower? Check. Okay, then, you’re all set to waste a good deal of your life plugged right into consumer oblivion. Isn’t modernity just fabulous?!

I only neared my brother’s DVD tower, out of that familiar desperation to escape the reality of my awkward bi-monthly family visit. Somewhere, in between the time your mother has once again implicitly let it be known you’ve not amounted to what you should have, and the moment following eight meaningless remarks about the state of recent weather, you look around the room, and you think, quite simply, “What can I do, here, to pass the time without having to sincerely engage my family?” My brother’s DVD tower seemed like a pretty good idea.

Continue reading ‘Guest post by Aaron Darc: Morgan and the Multiplex’

“My ideal is: all children in state schools.”

Published
by
Paul Norton
3 months, 3 weeks ago
in Education and Religion
. 124 Comments

Which politically correct lefty said that?

The answer is (drum roll) Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Ms. Ali is once again touring Australia, lapping up right-wing adulation at her public appearances and in the media. It is to be hoped that, whilst she is in this country, her robust advocacy of the republican democratic principle of universal secular public education (with which I wholeheartedly agree) gets something like the attention which has been focused on some of her other opinions.

Update: The correct answer is that it’s actually Ms. Ali’s supporter Frits Bolkestein who made the statement quoted in the title of this post. Thanks Dr. Cat for the correction. However it is a position which Ms. Ali can be assumed to endorse on the basis of her opposition to Section 23 of the Dutch Constitution.

The ultimate public-private partnership?

Published
by
Mark
3 months, 4 weeks ago
in Economics, Energy, Indigenous, International, Poverty, Race and Religion
. 40 Comments

In the (new) tradition of rich dude saves the world, someone I’d never heard of, Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest - apparently Australia’s richest man, has been putting his head together with Noel Pearson and Kevin Rudd to announce a plan to create 50 000 full time private sector jobs for Indigenous Australians. Incidentally, I’m sure Pearson is behind the phraseology of a “covenant”, which no doubt appeals to our religiously inclined Prime Minister as well. No doubt such proposals should be judged on their merits, and the whole thing appears fairly sketchy at the moment.

But it is fair, I think, to say that it’s consonant with not just corporate social responsibility agendas, but also with the broader phenomenon of the privatisation of development assistance which we see worldwide - also in the field of public health. One of the criticisms of such programs - often delivered by NGOs deriving funding from foundations owned by benefactors of great wealth - such as Bill Gates - or foundations which leverage money off showbiz or biz or even political celebrity (as in Bill Clinton’s activities) is their paternalism and the lack of an integrated and properly public focus on the true dimensions of a problem - and the tendency or at least the temptation to focus on outcomes which make for good pr. Of course, in the symbolism driven political environment in which we live, you could make equally telling criticisms of a lot of public sector programs. This proposal also obviously partakes in the notion - beloved of Noel Pearson - that work and all its associated ethical dispositions are the solution to most - if not all - social ills.

There is also an obvious line of trajectory from one if not several of the logics of the Northern Territory Intervention. Continue reading ‘The ultimate public-private partnership?’

Nigerian Evangelicals and violent homophobia

Published
by
Kim
4 months, 1 week ago
in Authoritarianism, Developing world, Ethics, International, Lesbian and Gay, Politics, Religion and Sexuality
. 39 Comments

We’ve featured a couple of posts here about the upheavals in the Anglican Church over conservative bishops’ hatred of teh gay, and the farce that is the Lambeth Conference, where openly gay American Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson has been prohibited from attending - alone of all the 800 something bishops worldwide. At the earlier conservative meeting in Jerusalem, GAFCON, where Sydney’s own Archbishop Jensen was among the movers and shakers, the pr line was that the conservative African bishops were only concerned with the purity of the biblical faith, standing against all the terrible first world postmodern relativism.

In fact, the story of Nigerian Christian gay rights activist Davis Mac-Iyalla, who has just been granted asylum by the British government, goes a long way towards demonstrating what is actually at stake in the alleged Christianity of the Nigerian church’s hierarchy. As does their attitude towards legislation proposed in Nigeria last year. All this is very far from some genteel doctrinal dispute, or a culture war only violent in its rhetoric.

Ecclesiastical shenanigans update links post

Published
by
Kim
4 months, 1 week ago
in Ethics, International, Lesbian and Gay, Media, Politics, Religion and Sexuality
. 5 Comments

Just a quick post to update some of the stories we’ve been following around the ecclesiastical traps - Irfan Yusuf, writing in New Matilda, contrasts the treatment doled out to Sheikh Al-Hilaly with the response (or lack thereof) from media and political figures to Bishop Anthony Fisher’s comments about survivors of sexual abuse. In an article on the same theme in Crikey, Yusuf links to a rather damning take at Media Watch on the News Limited coverage and commentary of accusations of church indifference to the victims of sexual abuse day raised during the World Youth Day event they were paid sponsors of.

Meanwhile, at the Lambeth Conference, conservative Anglican bishops are taking every opportunity to interrogate their fellow prelates about their ideological soundness on the loud condemnation of teh gay. Probably heretically, the Archbishop of York has suggested that there might just be more important issues for Christians than the ordination of gay bishops.

Homosexuality not actually work of the devil, report finds

Published
by
Mark
4 months, 1 week ago
in Authoritarianism, Books, Writers & Writing, Ethics, Europe, Feminism, International, Lesbian and Gay, Media, Politics, Religion, Sexuality, Sociology and Women
. 9 Comments

It was a very easy contrast to make for the media - while World Youth Day 2008 has been acclaimed as a success by the Catholic Church in Australia, Anglicans were tearing themselves to pieces, with the decennial Lambeth Conference reduced to a farce. A large number of quasi-schismatic conservative bishops boycotted, having earlier set up a quasi-church outside the Anglican Communion’s traditional structures at GAFCON in Jerusalem.

What’s all the fuss about? Teh gay.

Continue reading ‘Homosexuality not actually work of the devil, report finds’

Pope Benedict XVI apologises to victims of sexual abuse in Australia

Published
by
Kim
4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Activism, Authoritarianism, Crime, Disasters, Ethics, Media, Parenting, Politics, Religion and Sydney
. 36 Comments

The text of the papal apology, delivered this morning at a Mass in St Mary’s Cathedral, can be read here.

The symbolism of the setting for the apology - a mass for seminarians and members of religious orders and the consecration of a new altar for the Cathedral - was no doubt intended by the Vatican to signal that the Pope was speaking sternly to those at the centre of the institution. But it’s also deeply problematic - as it suggests that the problem is only one for the church, excluding the victims who were left outside while the pomp and panoply of the liturgy took place for the exclusive benefit of the hierarchy.

Continue reading ‘Pope Benedict XVI apologises to victims of sexual abuse in Australia’

What Pope Benedict XVI actually said at World Youth Day

Published
by
Kim
4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Australiana, Culture, Media, Politics, Religion, Sociology, Sydney and Urbanism
. 37 Comments

We’ve done our best to provide a reasonably comprehensive coverage of World Youth Day here at LP, in part because the News Limited papers, being major sponsors of the Pope fest, have studiously ignored most of the actual hard news, except to cast stones at those criticising the Church’s conduct on several justifiable grounds, in favour of happy-clappy stories about the happy-clappy pilgrims and general hagiography. As I commented earlier, the irony is that B16 himself is treated more like a pop star than a Pontiff on a mission, so in the interests of balance and fairness, if anyone’s actually interested in the full text of what the Pope had to say, you can read it here. As journalist and veteran Vatican watcher John L. Allen jr. observes, it’s classic Ratzinger.

Greetings from Flagsville

Published
by
suz
4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Religion, Sociology and Sydney
. 73 Comments

I’m writing from an office in the Sydney CBD. Catholic ‘youth’ (some of them looking a tad middle aged) have been streaming down the street towards the harbour for the past two or more hours. (The Pope is due to take a harbour cruise soon, so I guess they’re all going down to see him.) It’s official - there are a lot of people attending WYD. And they come from all over the world. I know this because they are all waving national flags. There goes the American flag, here’s New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, Fiji, Australia, of course, and the Aboriginal flag … followed by a flag which is light blue with a yellow circle in the middle, Germany, Canada, more Americans, more flags which are unfamiliar to me… Continue reading ‘Greetings from Flagsville’

Emma Foster: In memoriam

Published
by
Kim
4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Authoritarianism, Crime, Disasters, Ethics, Law, Media, Melbourne, Parenting, Politics, Religion and Sydney
. 56 Comments

I hope that Anthony Foster and his family, who intend to confront Pope Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell in Sydney this week over the Catholic Church’s treatment of their late daughter, Emma Foster, who took her own life in January and her sister Katie, both of whom were raped as primary school children by Father Kevin O’Donnell, aren’t dismissed as “Catholic bashing” and raining on the World Youth Day parade or subjected to victim blaming as Anthony Jones was. Foster told the tragic tale of his daughters’ abuse and how it marked their lives horrendously for the worse, and probably brought Emma’s life to a close, on Lateline tonight.

Continue reading ‘Emma Foster: In memoriam’

What is the purpose of World Youth Day?

Published
by
Mark
4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Australiana, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, History, International, Politics, Religion and Sociology
. 40 Comments

Other aspects of World Youth Day 2008 have been discussed in previous posts which can be accessed here. In this post, I’d like to concentrate on why it is being held in Sydney at all.

Dr Paul Collins is probably one of the best known commentators on Catholic affairs in Australia. A former priest, he had his own run in with Cardinal Ratzinger and the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith a few years ago, which didn’t stop him from writing a rather upbeat assessment of the prospects of Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy in God’s New Man. Some of the hopes he had in 2005 have now dissipated and he takes a rather jaundiced view of the Church’s prospects in his new book - Believers: Does Australian Catholicism Have a Future?

Collins is on the “progressive” wing of the Church, and to pose the question in the terms he does implies a view that Catholicism in Australia is in crisis. But it’s worth noting that view is firmly shared by the conservatives, and in fact World Youth Day’s Australian sojourn is supposed to be a big part of the cure for the faith’s ills.

Continue reading ‘What is the purpose of World Youth Day?’

Is criticism of World Youth Day automatically Catholic bashing?

Published
by
Kim
4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Authoritarianism, Ethics, Feminism, History, Lesbian and Gay, Media, NSW Government, Politics, Religion, Sexuality, Sydney and Urbanism
. 82 Comments

It’s no secret that “the sectarian strand” is one of the less attractive aspects of Australian history, and interestingly, probably not one featured highly either in the so-called “black armband” or triumphalist narratives so beloved of our home grown Antipodean culture warriors. That may be because the deep cleavages - overlapping but not identical to class and ethnicity - around Catholicism and Protestantism needed to be elided and to be buried in order to construct the “Anglo-Celtic” identity which came into its own at the same time that the state aid controversy was settled into its grave and multiculturalism launched on its career. And not coincidentally. “Anglos” and “Celts” were on different sides of the political and cultural coin in the Great Southern Land of the Holy Spirit for most of its whitefella history. In a way, Gough Whitlam is probably the progenitor of the “mainstream” Anglo-Celtic Australian. But sectarianism typically rears its head as a defensive accusation whenever the Catholic Church is particularly prominent in public debate, and whenever criticism is directed at the Church’s institutional power.

In the context of World Youth Day in Sydney this week, this accusation has been levelled both with regard to criticism of the extraordinary powers granted to police by Greg Craven and with regard to the ABC’s highlighting of Cardinal George Pell’s ethically very questionable handling of clergy sexual abuse complaints by Andrew Bolt. More broadly, the media sponsors of World Youth Day at News Limited have worked themselves into a lather of holy righteousness, denouncing “aggressive secularism” and lauding all the Popey goodness they’re sponsoring - without disclosing that sponsorship in their journalistic or opinion pieces.

It may well be that a residue of sectarian anti-Catholicism might be in play on the margins of all this, but one of the big ironies is that while Tony Abbott and others speculated that Pope Benedict’s message might not be communicated effectively, the Pope himself has seemingly become a football to be kicked around by the usual suspects in distinctly Australian culture wars which often have only a tenuous connection with his concerns. But are there not genuine issues - of public interest - that can and should be raised at a time when Catholicism is top of the pops in the media stakes?

Continue reading ‘Is criticism of World Youth Day automatically Catholic bashing?’

Greetings from Happy-Clappyville

Published
by
suz
4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Religion, Sociology and Sydney
. 49 Comments

I’m an ex-Catholic, 30+ years removed - still, I have the insider’s understanding of Catholicism. At least, I thought I did…

I’d always thought of ‘happy-clappies’ as Protestants. The folk Mass of the 1970s was a far more sedate and yes, folky affair than the sweaty swaying and fainting of the bible-bashing evangelicals.

I live, work and play in the area at the heart of World Youth Day but had told myself it would be easy to ignore it all. (Maybe I couldn’t quite believe that thousands of people would travel for an event like that.) Nevertheless, among the local soccer mums, special WYD resident parking permits began to be a conversational item a few weeks ago, along with road closures and the erection of security fences in Centennial Park. Two weeks ago in the park, a vehicle full of men in suits glided across the lawn as I walked my dog, at the Randwick Racecouse end - very secret-service-like.

I began to spy my first ‘pilgrims’ last week - young people with backpacks wandering near St Mary’s Cathedral or mulling around in Hyde Park (where there are huge WYD marquees). Continue reading ‘Greetings from Happy-Clappyville’

World Youth Day 08

Published
by
Kim
4 months, 2 weeks ago
in Australiana, Culture, Politics, Religion and Sydney
. 57 Comments

Gary Sauer-Thompson:

I hope that we will be spared the sermons from an authoritarian leadership about the spiritually dead, the soulless, secular uncaring, of liberal Australia society violating the sacredness of life etc etc as well as the repeat of the attacks on Islam and Muslim-Australians for undermining western civilization.

Can I suggest a theme? Sermons on reconciliation with a liberal Australia and secular humanism instead of ones on heartless and godless liberalism.

It doesn’t look like his prayers will be answered: Populate or perish: Pell

“There is a crisis in the Western world. No Western country is producing enough babies to keep the population stable, no Western country,” he said.

Continue reading ‘World Youth Day 08′

Annoyed! III

Published
by
Mark
4 months, 3 weeks ago
in Authoritarianism, Crime, Ethics, Media, NSW Government, Relationships, Religion and Sexuality
. 116 Comments

Irfan Yusuf has the money quote on all the World Youth Day imbroglios, writing in today’s New Matilda:

I guess it really boils down to values. Cardinal Pell once accused Muslims of having difficulty separating Church from State. Unless he openly distances himself from (and not just denies involvement in) increased police powers designed to protect pilgrims from annoyance, his own secular credentials might look compromised.

On Lateline last night, in the context of new revelations about the crimes of Father Terrence Goodall, and George Pell’s casuistry in dealing with clergy abuse victim Anthony Jones, and his avoidance of any admission of culpability and therefore responsibility for the consequences of his actions, host Tony Jones interviewed prominent Catholic journalist and author Robert Blair Kaiser.

And I think that model can be applied to modern times and we can be a much more responsible, accountable church in a local situation where the bishop is not appointed by the Pope but elected by the people.

In referring to the democratising forces unleashed by Vatican II, Kaiser was suggesting that the root cause - not just of clergy abuse but also of cover-ups and grossly inadequate responses to its “horror” - is a deeply authoritarian tradition and its accompanying mindset and culture. George Pell is one of the leading lights of the Catholic “restorationists” who want to put all the genies of Vatican II back in the bottle, and return to a “Father Knows Best” model which has given us Catholics a Church marred and contaminated by misogyny and authoritarianism. Pell’s attitude to political power (which has been on show with World Youth Day) and his treatment of those whom some priests and brothers have monstered is cut from the same cloth - a desire to protect the institution and its power above all else. Continue reading ‘Annoyed! III’