Shelfari

My "Shelfari" Bookshelf is a listing of books I am currently reading, dipping into or recently read.

I cannot not join the disgust as well

(I just have to put in these pieces from Leunig. Absolutely brilliant! My soul aches like his. Read the whole article and have your life 'changed'!

The glass is half full of what?
MICHAEL LEUNIG
July 30, 2010

... All too quickly another election approaches, and instead of feeling gratitude or elation about the blessings of democracy, there are a great many who feel a pronounced spiritual slump. As a friend wrote to me recently: "I'm picking up a worn-out sadness about the election . . . like when one gets the Santa Claus costume out all over again: more ho, ho, ho but the same old sham, and everybody knows it." ...

... Like the modern Christmas, elections have become disgusting. Intelligent meaning has been much discarded in favour of gimmicks, entertainments and irritating confections: a travesty indeed, yet also a failure and a tragedy. For instead of it being a time of vitality — an intelligent illuminating moment when a nation might focus and reflect intently upon its situation — the election has become yet another distraction from what might matter most deeply and seriously....

... Election? politics has mutated and, in unprecedented measure, ? become both anal and manic; an unholy double neurosis that has created its own unique form of self-harm and stupidity. A situation ?otherwise commonly described by the phrase? "we seem to have lost our way". There is something forlorn about these everyday words....

... a population that is so disgusted and baffled by the situation, so weary of being spoken to like idiots, so bored and disenchanted with politics that even a ridiculous television cooking show is ?preferred viewing to the leaders' national debate....

... And why must all of this loom so large? Why all the fuss? Couldn't they do it more nimbly? Are there not more interesting and pressing matters at hand to exercise our attentions — like what are we doing here and where lies peace and truth?...

... When in despair at? such a loud, egotistical system, we may fall back upon the likes of the ancient poet-sage Lao Tzu, who offered an excellent idea about political leaders.
"A leader is best when people barely know he exists. When his work is done and his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves."...

... There may come a time ?when the soul has had quite enough of politics. Perhaps I have reached that time. Yet there is grief in it somewhere. ...

... It's like when you find out the truth about Santa Claus. There is grief in it, yet there is moving forward also....

How about some decency from certain media?

"The Australian's" smearing of Julia Gillard reached new heights this morning when reactionary lightweight Janet Albrechtsen launched a deeply personal attack on Gillard. Albrechtsen didn’t mention the Gillard's ears, but that was because her sights were trained somewhat lower on the Gillard anatomy, accusing her of “showcasing a bare home and an empty kitchen as badges of honour and commitment to her career” and not knowing about how to meet “the needs of a husband or partner.”

It was Bill Heffernan’s “deliberately barren” tripe all over again.

And of course needless to say, no male politician was subject to the same withering assessment. But they never are, no matter how many ruined marriages or disappointed kids they leave behind.

None of this is accidental. It’s part of a systematic assault to smear Gillard by an outfit that wants to be the local version of Fox News. And her gender is at the heart of the campaign.

“The sisterhood should stop reading,” said Albrechtsen before attacking Gillard. Sisterhood?

You don’t have to be part of any “sisterhood” to find this sort of garbage deeply offensive and contrary to the simple notion that a politician should be judged on his or her performance and on her policies, not on what she looks like or how she serves “the needs of a husband or partner.”
(from tis morning's "Crikey")

From Archbishop Oscar Romero

It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view. The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is beyond our vision. We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us. No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No programme accomplishes the church's mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything. This is what we are about: We plant seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities. We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for God's grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.

And we are approaching panic over 1 orange figure?

Double click on the image to discover what really is with respect to "asylum seekers".

On 'asylum seekers'

Taxpayers will be wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on several thousand asylum seekers, to assuage the xenophobic instincts of a few swinging voters in marginal electorates. Unedifying indeed.
(Comment in "Crikey" on this morning's comments by PM)

Is this how we support those in need?

The Age can reveal that federal government aid agency AusAID has agreed to help Football Federation Australia's World Cup bid and has boosted funding for aid programs in Africa and Oceania.

The FFA is trying to win support from the African and Oceania representatives on FIFA's executive committee - a group of 24 men who decide the location of the World Cup.


Documents seen by The Age reveal AusAID director-general Bruce Davis was told by senior FFA figures in March last year they were ''looking for the capacity to provide Australian aid assistance that is identifiably 'football delivered' and football relevant, though not necessarily football exclusive''.

from "The Age" 2 July 2010

Racism from both sides of politics?

Comments by our two main political leaders, and various party apparatchiks, recently concerning sustainability causes me to think that it's funny how we like policies that increase population levels through a higher birth rate, but not ones that achieve the same goal through immigration.

Wendell Berry on the role of a University

In an essay published in 1987, The Loss of the University, Berry argued for a college education that would broaden a student’s exposure to a number of disciplines rather than produce the narrow skills of career-minded transients with no sense of a homeland.

At a 2007 commencement address at Bellarmine University, Berry railed against “the great and the would-be-great ‘research universities.’ These gigantic institutions, increasingly formed upon the ‘industrial model,’ no longer make even the pretense of preparing their students for responsible membership in a family, a community, or a polity … The American civilization so ardently promoted by these institutions is to be a civilization entirely determined by technology, and not encumbered by any thought of what is good or worthy or neighborly or humane.”

"the scum and refuse of society" - "preferential option for the poor"

The first chapter, titled "The Scum of the Earth," (Reason, Faith and Revolution) is Eagleton's articulation of God's "preferential option for the poor." He translates anawim as "the shit of the earth—the scum and refuse of society who constitute the cornerstone of the new form of human life known as the kingdom of God." To make the connection, it is necessary to discern the character of Jesus in all his radicality:

Jesus, unlike most responsible American citizens, appears to do no work and is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He is presented as jobless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinsfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the Establish ment, and scourge of the rich and powerful. . . . The morality Jesus preaches is reckless, extravagant, improvident, over-the-top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents: forgive your enemies, give away your cloak as well as your coat, turn the other cheek, love those who insult you, walk the extra mile, take no thought for tomorrow.

He is the one who embodies the God of scripture:

The non-God or anti-God of Scripture, who hates burnt offerings and acts of smug self-righteousness, is the enemy of idols, fetishes, and graven images of all kinds—gods, churches, ritual sacrifice, the Stars and Stripes, nations, sex, success, ideologies, and the like.

And the derivative social body is completely an outrage in the world:

To the outrage of the Zealots, Pharisees, and right-wing rednecks of all ages, this body is dedicated in particular to all those losers, deadbeats, riffraff, and colonial collaborators who are not righteous but flamboyantly unrighteous.

Echolalia

"Echolalia' he told me. Then he referred me to Michael Leunig's comment. Echolalia is a psychiatric term referring to the meaningless repetition of spoken words. I found Watson's comments in the fly-leaf of his 'Bendable Learnings' - "Management speak has triumphed. It has made much of our everyday language dull, dimwitted and meaningless. .. Your words will be obscure and indigestible. You will conform to the new way. You will surrender the ability to write and speak with spontaneity or clarity and, with prolonged use, even your ability to think clearly."
Leunig says "I fancy echolalia could well refer to a condition in modern media and their captive communities. Like the compulsive rocking back and forth of the radically distressed, echolalia could be the name for the repetitious, unstoppable going around and around of dead or dying ideas in the culture; the boring babble and banging on in the vortex of tribal media chatter."

Praise be the non-celebrity

The moment at the end of "Middlemarch" ..
"The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who have lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
Reminds me of Yevtushenko's poem "People" with the 'verse'
"And if a man (sic) lived in obscurity
making friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting"
I'm totally over 'celebrities', politicians & famous people. Give me some good ordinary folk any day.

Poetry

Poetry gets to the issues more than anything I know. I have never been in a church environment where there is the same level of truthful speech about the way things are. It's not that church isn't truthful. It's just that poetry is a different kind of speech. Many of the poets remind me of that sense you get of the prophets like Jeremiah who describes the word of God like a fire in his bones that he has to get out.
(from I can't remember, I just put it in the notes of my iphone)