An Obadiah slope column.
Tragedy in Nashville: Preachers never know whether a talk about residence will apply to themselves. Pastor Chad Scruggs lost his Nine-year-old daughter Hallie in the mass shooting this week at his covenant church in Nashville.
Here is part of his sermon on Lazarus from early march (via World mag)
The whole time Jesus knew how the whole thing would go down, and yet what are the most remarkable things about this story, it always gets me, is that knowing exactly what he’s about to do, Jesus sits down and does what? He weeps. Do you see that a strong confidence in the end of the story does not undo or justify the absence of grief in the middle. A mature faith adds its tears to the sadness in our world. Jesus says blessed are those who mourn all the while not losing confidence and how that sadness will eventually be overcome in him.
If you’re doubting the love of Jesus, you try to work it out through your circumstances. No, you never read your circumstances and then read the Love of Jesus. You read the Love of Jesus towards your circumstances. If you are doubting his love for you, if you are struggling with his authority in the midst of sadness and confusion, let the cross speak to you again. Look there so that you might say confidently, ‘see how he loves me. This is the one man given for me.’
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Tightrope: Here’s Obadiah’s reflection on Vic MP Moira Deeming’s seemingly defiant response to her suspension by the Liberal party room.
She tweeted to the Left Women Speak rally colleagues: “Don’t worry, I never condemned you, or KD or JK.”
The “you” was Angie Jones, KD is Katherine Deves, Scott Morrisons’ “captains pick” for the seat of Warringah in the federal election, and KJ is Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, the UK-based activist who toured Australia.
These four women were organisers of the Melbourne rally.
But In her letter of contrition to the party room, Deeming wrote, “I admit with the benefit of hindsight of what has occurred that my participation may have been an error of judgement that resulted in unnecessary scrutiny.”
Pointing to that one sentence, Lyle Shelton, national director of the Family First Party, responded, “No such admission was warranted. She made no error of judgement.
“The error of judgement was made by her colleagues who did not attend the event with her and who remain silent about the very real threat to girls and women posed by men appropriating women’s gender.”
But did Deeming have a perfect record? Party Leader John Pesutto, who has had his own error of judgment in launching his attack on Deeming, had sent her a dossier, which is worth examining. The dossier is here if you want to check it out.
Two items in this dossier stand out above the charges that Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull had a habit of appearing on far-right forums (which Deeming, to some extent, answers in her letter in response to the dossier. ).
One is Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull’s use of a barbie doll wearing a Nazi uniform in her social media profile and using a “pridestapo” logo on the spinster website. Deeming condemns the barbie doll as a poor distasteful joke, with Minshull responding to being called a Nazi doll.
But she seems to think that the “pridestapo” logo is a legitimate visual comment on the “policing’ of debates by progressive forces.
But being a free speech advocate does not mean using Nazi references.
Another item in the Pesutto dossier is an Angie Jones tweet that takes up the slogan displayed by the Nazis who gatecrashed the Melbourne “let women speak” rally. “Nazis and women want to get rid of paedo filth why don’t you?” (The @anjijones Twitter profile appears to be down.) When asked what Deeming had to disown to avoid suspension, Pesutto listed this tweet in an interview with radio national’s Patricia Karvelas.
This raised two issues for Obadiah.
- Quoting the Nazi banner hardly amounts to distancing yourself from them. This reinforces the major criticism of Minshull that she associates too much with the far right.
- Denigration of LGBTQIA people as paedophiles is what Pesutto was complaining about. Unfortunately, he was right to do so.
Deeming sensibly, it seems to Obadiah distanced herself from the most substantial charges in the Pesutto dossier.
In the long term, Pesutto may have done Deeming a favour by teaching her to be more thoughtful and cautious in what she puts her name to. But, at the same time, walking a tightrope, she does not want to “condemn” the other women from the rally.
As Obadiah observed earlier this week, the transgender issue needs calm debate, particularly regarding the medical evidence.
The antics of Deeming and the Let Women Speak cohort overshadowed two more critical stories about transgender: World Athletics’s move to ban male-to-female transgender athletes at elite levels and the lack of pushback against it.
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Quote of the week: Obadiah heard this great quote referenced on the World Opinions podcast.
“I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
This reminded Obadiah of a story in Donald Horne’s autobiography Portrait of an Optimist about Lilian Roxon, an Aussie author who made it big in New York as a rock and roll historian but had been a lowly sub-editor on a raunchy tabloid magazine called Weekend edited by Horne for the Packer family.
Horne had habitually issued sets of journalistic rules to the staff, such as “Twelve hints for writing good blurbs.”
“Lillian told me later (years later when she was living in New York, where she was later to die) that on nights when she couldn’t sleep, she would sometimes read over her favourite Weekend bulletins to reassure herself that life could seem orderly.”
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Seen on the side of a school bus: On one of those private-school-branded buses, Obadiah spies the slogan “dare to be more.” At architecture school, Obadiah learned that “less is more,” a saying of minimalist architect Mies van der Rohe, a pioneer of modernism. But perhaps less is more should apply to us – being less so that Jesus can be more.