Australia’s all abuzz with the slight controversy over Tourism Australia’s latest marketing campaign, “Where The Bloody Hell Are You?”. A television commercial features ten scenes in which Australians explain to potential overseas tourists that we’re all set up for them to come. Thinking we’re a great country to visit is not enough. These people need to book their flights and get on down under.
The controversy, of course, is the use of the Strine vernacular phrase “Where the Bloody Hell Are You?” John Howard’s gone on record saying that this phrase is an acceptable part of Aussie lingo. There are other words that we shouldn’t be saying.
And then there’s the controversy over which scenes have been included in the TV spot. In today’s Gold Coast Bulletin there’s an element of pique at the omission of our beautiful destination in the promotion. The closest we got was the Great Barrier Reef which is 24 hours drive away.
I’ve written up the television commercial at Duncan’s TV Adland, including where to see the spot online.
At the way home from Melbourne I bought a copy of “The Monthly“, an Australian magazine launched last year with a self-description as “an intelligent, independent voice”.
The lead essay, by Gideon Haigh, is on Google’s effect on education and general intelligence. Haigh draws on Neil Postman’s reminder that technological change is neither additive nor subtractive, but ecological. Our whole environment has been changed by the rise of Google.
Issues covered in the article:
1. How does Google PageRank work? Isn’t it important that we have some way of analysing the reliability of information sources?
2. The ‘dark web’ ignored by Google (80% of web content) includes information held by universities, libraries, associations, businesses and government agencies.
3. Google’s vulnerability to being ‘gamed’ in which GoogleRank is manipulated by web authors and spammers.
4. Gigablast and Exalead, perhaps superior search engines, are ignored by a public in love with the ‘easy-to-use’ Google.
5. Most people have little idea about how to effectively use search engines.
Gideon Haigh goes on to examine the impact of Google on education. Younger teachers know how to recognise and check for Google-enabled plagiarism. Educative tasks now must focus on higher levels of thinking as collection of information is made so easy. However students are tempted to make do with articles they can find on the internet and ignore the work which is only published in print journals and books.
The essay finishes with an examination of the Google project to digitize the world’s books. Clearly many people are unhappy about the threat to copyright holders, publishers and libraries.
The article’s in print but not online. Perhaps some time soon Google will digitize it and make it available for us to read. In the meantime you’ll have to race down to your newsagent and buy the magazine.
Today I caught the last day of Brian McLaren’s appearances in Melbourne.
This morning and this afternoon were at Tabor College. Brian started the day by giving us a basic introduction to the three worlds we find co-existing and struggling with one another: premodernism, modernism and post modernism. It was helpful to reflect on the challenge the conservative Islamic nations and religious institutions see in the dominant modernist culture as seen in the United States. After lunch we explored the implications of moving into a post-colonial paradigm. He explored with us stories of Christian collusion in colonialism in Rwanda and in the United States. Our challenge is not to lay blame with previous generations, but to learn from their experience so that we can honestly and courageously work differently now.
This evening was hosted by Forge Missional Training Network at Retro Cafe in Brunswick St. Brian talked about the challenge of rethinking the heart of the gospel around the life and teaching of Jesus. What would happen if we stopped interpreting the ‘kingdom of God’ solely in terms of life after death and began to cooperate with God’s dream or economy right here on Earth?
It was good to see Forge mending the bridges that were damaged last year during the release of Don Carson’s book, “Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church’. Brian’s returning next year to speak at one of the Forge summits. It would be good to see if we can arrange a gathering in Queensland.
Some random thoughts on the occasion of a birthday…
This time 44 years ago I was coming to terms with breathing. Didn’t take too long to work out.
Despite years of practice, my body is not always in control. As I was making a fresh plunger of coffee this morning the handle of the plunger came off. Managed to fix it temporarily - long enough to tip the glass part of the plunger into the sink and break it. Not good. However when I took the broken plunger round to the kitchen manager he smiled at me cheerily and assured me it had been his favourite plunger! “Never mind”, he said, as he threw out the broken pieces and retrieved the potentially useful ‘unbroken parts’.
I can’t be everywhere at once. I’m currently in Melbourne, in between conferences. Family’s back on the Gold Coast. Text messages, mobile phone calls, Messenger conversations make up for some of the distance. But there’s still the physical gulf.
I’ve had birthday wishes today from family, colleagues and from complete strangers like the Suncorp banking consultant assuring me my mortgage payment had been sorted out after all.
I was reflecting with Graham Beattie, my colleague, over dinner tonight at an Indian restaurant at Eastland, in Ringwood. Reflecting on why I write on so many blogs. Some of it’s to do with my need to be known. Not famous. Not infamous. Just known for who I am. It’s a strength and a liability. A strength when it comes to blogging. A liability when it comes to keeping a life balanced.
I’m in Melbourne this week, mostly for a gathering of Uniting Church mission educators. We’re at Holy Cross Centre in Templestowe, engaging with Tom Bandy, a consultant over from North America. Today’s discussion got us talking about how we help focus the energy of the Uniting Church in Australia as a movement. We centred on the spiritual depth that is a core part of any church’s preparation for mission. In Queensland we’ve neglected that in our resourcing of congregations by Synod staff.
At the heart of our unity and calling is the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus, in his life, death and resurrection demonstrated God’s love in action as much as in being. I’m reminded of an insight from the doctrine and truth course last week. If we change ‘one, holy, catholic, apostolic church’ from adjectives to verbs, we get a ‘uniting, sanctifying, boundary-crossing, sending-in-mission church’.
We unpacked some of the work done in the first year of the Uniting Church’s life - in the form of a description of our call into being as a distinct movement in Australia…
Our call as the Uniting Church in Australia is:
To preach Christ the risen crucified one and confess him as Lord;
To bear witness to the unity of faith and life in Christ, Rising above cultural, economic, national and racial boundaries;
To engage in fearless prophetic ministry in relation to social evils which deny God’s active will for justice and peace;
To act with God alongside the oppressed, the hurt, the poor;
To accept responsibility for the wise use and conservation of the finite resources of this earth for the benefit of all;
To recognise, treasure and use the gifts of the Spirit given to all God’s people for ministering;
And to live a creative, adventurous life of faith, characterised by openness and flexibility, hope and joy.
I’ve finally managed to transfer all 428 Pacific Highlander posts from the last year, complete with comments, from Blogger to Wordpress format on this site. I used a handy little plugin for Wordpress that meant that I could do it all without too much work. The only limits to the process were the need to ask for new php extensions to be installed on the server (Thanks Geoff!), the capacity of the postkiwi files to cope with changes (I managed up to 20 at a time before timing out) and the opportunity to realign photographs and add categories. Now that’s all over I can get back to normal blogging patterns.
This morning a colleague and I presented a reading report on feminism and postmodernist approaches to doctrine. We were given the challenge of presenting the insights of Mary McClintock Fulkerson as outlined in her chapter in the Cambridge Guide to Postmodern Theology, edited by Kevin J. Vanhoozer.
Mary’s an academic theologian based at Duke Divinity School, Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina. She’s known for her 1994 book, “Changing the Subject: Women’s Discourses and Feminist Theology” in which she explores the complexity of recent studies on the experiences of women. Of particular interest to me were her reflections on the differences between Presbyterian and Pentecostal women. Her next book, “Traces of Redemption: Theology for Worldly Church”, will focus on doctrine of the church in light of racial diversity and differently abled.” She’s a minister with the Presbyterian Church (USA).
Not only is Mary an academic. She’s also a partner in the establishment of Third Reconstruction Institutes in which academics and grass roots activists continue the work of the civil rights movement in the United States.
As a class we were looking for ways in which Mary’s work critiques the limitations of modernism.
At the beginning McClintock Fulkerson makes it very clear that feminist theology began and continues with a liberation hermeneutic. In many ways feminism has been its own form of postmodernism. She recognises that the ‘mainstream’ of feminism has been dominated by white Euro-American middle class women and has overlooked or attempted to assimilate the voices of those calling themselves womanist (African American) and Mujerista (Hispanic). And then of course the voices of Asian Americans, women in Africa and Asia, the voices of lesbian feminists. McClintock Fulkerson is clear that she speaks as a white middle class academic woman.
Mary chooses three themes from postmodernism that resonate with the liberation hermeneutic of recent feminist theology:
1. Instability of the subject.
2. The Unsayable
3. Liberative Implications
Mary points out that early feminism, in its critique of male-dominated society, often called for or attempted to describe a ‘unified natural woman subject’. Likewise the choice of sexism as the primary sin has flattened the differences and oppressions linked with racism, class exploitation and heterosexism.
Postmodernist feminist theologians have critiqued the capacity for anyone to categorise and describe the experience of women without reference to broader experiences. Foucault’s poststructural work reminds us that signifying does not refer to a fixed, external reality. The experiences of both women and men continue to be transformed by relational experience.
Finally Mary refers to the growing edge of feminist theology as it engages with a vision of liberation that goes beyond gender and explores economic and political transformation.
If you’re in Australia, look out on your TV this Sunday. Tooheys New is launching a new ad that has the potential to rival the Carlton Draught Big Ad. At www.fortheloveofbeer.com.au you can see it now, in Vividas format. For more details see my post at Duncan’s TV Adland. This is the answer to the mystery billboard I posted on earlier this week.
I’m taking part in a week-long intensive course on ‘Doctrine and Truth After Modernity’, taught by Geoff Thompson at Trinity College, Brisbane. Today we examined the cultural-linguistic approach to doctrine developed by George Lindbeck at Yale University in the 1970s and 1980s.
Reading up the context further I’ve come to realise that Lindbeck, a Lutheran, was heavily engaged in Lutheran-Catholic dialogue. He presents two dominant models of understanding religion and the place of doctrine in it and then presents a third option.
The propositionalist approach treats doctrines as informative propositions or direct truth claims about objective realities. This approach raises the stakes in such discussions by saying that a doctrine, once true, is always true, and once false, is always false.
The experiential-expressive approach regards doctrines as culturally and psychologically conditioned expressions of inner feelings and experiences of the divine. In this model, a doctrine is a completely dispensable religious artefact, and is only incidentally related to the truth which actually lies in a ‘pre-cognitive’ ‘pre-linguistic’ realm.
Lindbeck proposes the ‘cultural lingustic’ model in which doctrines are to religion what grammar is to the language of a given culture. Doctrines are the tool required to speak of God truthfully. As such they do not reflect pre-cognitive, pre-linguistic expreinces of the divine. The doctrines themselves produce, or at least structure, such experiences. In this model, doctrines to not carry the burden of being the primary focus of truth. That is borne by the community as a whole.
On reflection, I’m somewhat cautious about the polarisation Lindbeck is projecting into schools of theological thought. Most theologians would need to distort their approaches to fit into any of Lindbeck’s descriptions of theological method. I warm to Lindbeck’s use of theory from lingusitics, anthropology and sociology of religion. I find it useful to be aware of the processes being used and evoked as we attempt to engage with another doctrinally.
Over the last two weeks I’ve noticed an enigmatic roadside billboard featuring faces staring up into the sky. At first there were no clues. But this week there’s a web site address…
Duncan Macleod posts on life, faith and culture in Australia, drawing from his involvement in the creative industry, the Uniting Church, the blogosphere, generational research, the emerging church and life on the Gold Coast.
At the way home from Melbourne I bought a copy of “
Mary’s an academic theologian based at 
Reading up the context further I’ve come to realise that Lindbeck, a Lutheran, was heavily engaged in Lutheran-Catholic dialogue. He presents two dominant models of understanding religion and the place of doctrine in it and then presents a third option.
