An Obadiah Slope column
Prayers to prepare for Easter: this Sunday is “the Sunday next to Lent,” the traditional season of preparing our hearts for Easter. these prayers come from the Church of England.
Almighty Father,
whose Son was revealed in majesty
before he suffered death upon the cross:
give us grace to perceive his glory,
that we may be strengthened to suffer with him
and be changed into his likeness, from glory to glory;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Holy God,
you know the disorder of our sinful lives:
set straight our crooked hearts,
and bend our wills to love your goodness
and your glory
in Jesus Christ our Lord.
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Saving a life: “NSW court orders ‘faith’ teen back into chemotherapy” was The Australian’s headline for a story of a Christian teenager who was convinced that Jesus had leaked her from bone cancer. Her doctors agreed that scans showed no tumours after Chemo treatment. But they believed it was medically impossible that the sarcoma was gone and that it would continue to progress in the next months.
The Court ordered that treatment continue, despite the teen and her parents believing a miracle had occurred.
Obadiah is sympathetic to the court’s decision. It affirms our society’s belief that protecting life is paramount. The hospital had sought a court injunction because they wanted to save the teen’s life.
Obadiah can’t help being perplexed though. Our society appears to have a double standard regarding the life of the unborn.
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Pedantry: Tasmanian pastor Mikey Lynch posted on FB that he was in in pedant mode. He clearly was:
“More minor editing pedantry #content
“—En dashes for coordinate relationships, not hyphens: male–female relationships, for example.
[Obadiah comments – same applies to Bible references for example: John 20: 30–31]
“—I tend to avoid capitalising the w in the sense of ‘the word of God’, unless it’s referring to the Word Incarnate. Most English Bible translations do the same. But, weirdly, style guides out there are quite inconsistent on this point.
“—It makes little sense to me why Lord and Saviour are almost universally capitalised with reference to Jesus, whereas, say great high priest is much less so.
Lynch went further and posted about compound adjectives, and when not to hyphenate them. The sort of thing about which Obadiah used to be lectured severely by Sub-editors.
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Learning from Chinese Artists: Every six months or so the White Rabbit gallery in inner Sydney’s Chippendale puts on a challenging exhibition of Chinese art. Challenging because you have to be prepared to see the world differently when you leave the gallery.
What happens when the party is over? The melancholy of an abandoned night club is captured in an installation by Chen Wei, which takes up almost a whole floor of the gallery. Inside Drunken Dance Hall it is not hard to imagine a stale beer smell and a sticky though shiny floor.
For westerners the US capitol is a symbol of democracy and a seat of global power.
But Jian Jun Xis The Empire in recreating the Capitol dome and rotunda in fragile timber at one twentieth scale presents a Chinese view of a rival which might collapse. But underneath the tilted dome is a powerful steel structure.
Analogous City for Art – This is an image of only part of a massive work by Drawing Architecture Studio. harnesses the power of a design program to draw a fantasy city. The only thing is that after nearly a month in North Asia, Obadiah feels he has been there.
