An Obadiah Slope column
All the jazz: Obadiah’s district has been the site of a jazz boomlet, with live jazz or blues at Miss Celies – a bar, and regular gigs in the Polish club and the Catholic club. So it was perhaps equipped with local exposure to jazz that he ventured into an inner city venue to experience the Berlin Psalm Project, marking musos and church planters Ali and Richard Maegraith, fresh from Berlin. Obadiah found the combination of jazz and Psalmody clicked – with the seven-piece band and the Psalms ranging over a wide list of emotions. Jazz expressed the psalms in a convincing way.
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Local History. Driving home from the concert, we passed Pittwood, the aged care facility sold by the NSW Presbyterians who are getting out of aged care, to the Baptists after the Anglicans said “no” when they bought the rest of the Presbyterians aged care operation. But the Baptists have bought a bit of their own history – the rather ugly part of the Pittwood campus is on the site of Morling College, the Baptist Seminary – and the home of its Principal George Morling, after whom it was named – before it became a neighbour of Macquarie University.
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Too right: Academic and commenter Stephen Chavura, who can rightly be described as conservative in theology and politics, stretched his audience recently with a short piece urging support for Aboriginal Sunday. Set up by activist and protestor William Copper, it is held on the Sunday nearest to January 26.
Chavura suggested a format using testimonies of aboriginal peoples, a “gospel centric” format, eschewing any protest. That might have been expected to get a reaction from lefty evangelicals and progressives. Tut the reaction Obadiah saw was from devoted followers. “This is the last thing we need or want and has no connection to Aboriginal history. Just STOP this stuff!”
“I am surprised that you have become woke and jumped on the indigenous band wagon. How dare any church devote a Sunday to just one race isn’t that racism.”
“What an unBiblical load of nonsense! The more you focus on differences the more it magnifies them. Love and treat everybody the same!”
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Vale Matt Peacock: Obadiah, among others, lost a hero this week with the death of ABC journo Matt Peacock. Of minor importance is that Peacock was an editor of National Student, the newspaper of the Australian Union of Students and a predecessor of Obadiah in that role. He became a hero to Obadiah for his coverage of Asbestos, beginning as an ABC cadet in 1973 and covering the long fight for victims to be compensated by James Hardie.
Based on Matt Peacock’s work, Obadiah mounted a one-person demonstration against James Hardie in the architecture faculty foyer at Adelaide Uni – urging his fellow students to boycott the free beer from the company. The professor had Obadiah’s placards torn down.