An Obadiah Slope column
The spelling of Türkiye/Turkey: One Facebooker recently asked, “Why are we now calling Turkey Türkiye? Do we now call France Francais and Germany Deutschland?” It is a fair question with a reasonably straightforward answer. They asked.
As The Guardian reported, Türkiye changed its name at the UN and asked everyone to use the new version.
To get the ü with the two dots, press down on the “u” on your mac keyboard, and the accent options pop up; for windows, you can use: alt+0252.
The name change and other recent examples include Madras becoming Chennai and Peking becoming Beijing, which isn’t controversial at all. Obadiah thinks there are name changes overdue close to home.
Such as our state capital cities.
- Meanjin. Brisbane.
- Warrane. Sydney.
- Narrm. Melbourne.
- Tarntanya. Adelaide.
- Boorloo. Perth.
- Nipaluna. Hobart.
This version of the list comes from a Tourism Australia consultation process “with local First Nations groups.
One argument for the change could be based on reconciliation and the desires of the local Voice groups coming into being. Another is the nature of the people who provided the existing names, which are an undistinguished lot. Can you remember anything worthwhile about any of the dead white males the cities are named for?
Here’s a list of what they are best known for.
Sir Thomas Makdougall Brisbane (1773–1860) was the sixth governor of NSW.
The first Viscount Sydney, Thomas Townshend (1733-1800), as the British Home Secretary, was responsible for the plan to establish a penal settlement at Botany Bay. He appointed Arthur Phillip, who named Sydney Cove, in his honour.
UK Prime Minister William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne (1779-1848), was the cuckolded husband in a famous scandal. His wife, Lady Caroline, began an affair with Lord Byron, the poet famously noting in her diary that he was “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” Lamb is pointed out as a politician as not having strong political convictions and ran a scandal-hit government.
Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen (1792-1849) was Queen of the United Kingdom and Hanover from 26 June 1830 to 20 June 1837 as the wife of King William IV. “Accounts of Queen Adelaide’s life are sparse.” notes the SA History hub.
Perth was named after the county of Perth in Scotland, the birthplace of Sir George Murray, then secretary of state for the colonies, by the first colonial Governor, Capt James Stirling.
Australia’s second oldest city was named Hobart Town after Robert Hobart, 4th earl of Buckinghamshire (1760-1816), then secretary of state for the colonies. As a Tory politician from an Irish seat, he fought any concessions to Catholics.
We could tackle state names too, but that would take significant consultation with First Nations as the colonial boundaries are artificial.
Image: map from Tourism Australia
A scholarly treatment of First Nations’ names for places can be found at https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt24h9tze
###
Office pic reveals a lot: Paige Paterson was one of the leaders of the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist denomination in the early eighties. However, he was fired as president of a very substantial theological college South West Baptist theological seminary, in 2018 after an investigation into the response to mishandling the investigation of the alleged rape of a student at another baptist seminary Seminary in 2003.
Christianity Today reported Patterson had sent an email “to the Chief of Campus Security in which Dr Patterson discussed meeting with the student alone so that he could ‘break her down’ and that he preferred no officials be present.”
Here is a picture of his office at SWBTS: which is revealing of the man, recently spread across the internet.
Obadiah is freaked out by this picture. What would you think if the head of a theological college you are studying at had an office like that?
Obadiah is not the only one who thinks it is creepy.
###
Wisdom from the New Yorker: book reviewer Casey Cep wanders through the lives of monks and how they devised ways to concentrate and not be distracted from their central task of prayer. “Like the virgin Sarah, who lived next to a river for sixty years without looking at it.”
The Wandering Mind: what Medieval Monks tell us about Distraction by Jamie Kriener is a book that catalogues how “medieval monasteries were filled with people who wanted to concentrate on God but couldn’t.” Mortification remains difficult. But the New Yorker reviewer ends up a little jealous of the monks.
“So many of us have half-done tasks on our to-do lists and half-read books on our bedside tables, scroll through Instagram while simultaneously watching Netflix, and swipe between apps and tabs endlessly, from when we first open our eyes until we finally fall asleep. one uncomfortable explanation for why so many aspects of our modern life corrode our attention is that they do not merit it. The problem for those of us who do not live in monasteries but hope to make good use of our days is figuring what might.”
###
Why says Christians can’t make the front page? Personally, Obadiah thinks God can use his own preferred pronouns.
###
Over in England, the leader of the Church of England is enclosed in a cloud of controversy (on LGBTQIA issues), but here’s a snippet from his speech to their church parliament, the General Synod, that put a smile on many Christians’ faces.
“In my scandalous youth, or rather Caroline and mine’s scandalous youth, as some may know, Caroline and I smuggled bibles behind the Iron Curtain. There will be some here who don’t remember the Iron Curtain. There will be some here who remember St Petersburg before that. At one place we went to in Romania, we had about 200 or more bibles to unload. I was doing that at night in a back garden, and Caroline was left with the elderly lady whose house it was. They had no common language – except Christian. They both spoke that. And thus, they sat together, with the occasional alleluia and waving their bibles at each other. It worked.”