Something good: buying back guns.

The SMH reports on one of the greatest legacies of former PM John Howard.

It's the unexpected saving of 200 lives per year from the guns buy-back in 1996, following the Port Arthur massacre.

From the report:

TEN years of suicide data after John Howard's decision to ban and then buy back 600,000 semi-automatic rifles and shotguns has had a stunning effect.

The buyback cut firearm suicides by 74 per cent, saving 200 lives a year, according to research to be published in The American Law and Economics Review.

A former Australian Treasury economist, Christine Neill, now with Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, Canada, said she found the research result so surprising she tried to redo her calculations on the off chance the total could have been smaller.

''I fully expected to find no effect at all,'' she told the Herald. ''That we found such a big effect and that it meshed with a range of other data was just shocking, completely unexpected.''

Mr Howard's agreement with the states to ban and buy back more than 600,000 weapons after the massacre at Port Arthur in April 1996 cut the country's stock of firearms by 20 per cent and roughly halved the number of households with access to guns.

Speaking of good books, here's another (probably)

Well I have to say "probably", because I haven't read it. But I know the preacher and his preaching, and this is his book about that preaching, written together with Paul Grimmond.

It's The Archer and the Arrow, a book all about preaching the gospel from one of Australia's greatest preachers, Phillip Jensen.

Tim Challies reviews it here.

Check these kids' books out!

Matthias Media, the buddies I used to work for, have some new kids books out. They are well worth a look.

Here's the Rag Doll by Stephanie Carmichael, and here's Over the Fence, also by Stephanie.

I would have definitely bought both of these for my 3 girls when they were younger. They were supposed to stay the same forever, but they never did. So now I look at books like these and think wistful thoughts.

I also think 'aha! who do I know with little kids?' Christmas approaches...

Doing theology Luther's way

Carl Trueman points out:

I want to draw attention to the fact that Luther does not talk about what constitutes theology but about what makes a theologian. This is somewhat characteristic of his approach: many people have noted the importance of his "theology of the cross," which he articulated most dramatically at the Heidelberg Disputation in 1518; but the text of the disputation theses do not speak of a theology of the cross; rather they speak of a theologian of the cross. Theology, for Luther, is the words spoken by human beings in response to the words God has first spoken to them; thus, theology is a personal action; and therefore, there can be no discussion of theology without first discussing the agent, the one who speaks theologically. Theology is an abstraction unless it is understood as the action of the theologian.

From here.

It's not first and foremost an intellectual exercise! The failure to realize that is what distresses me about some of the theology I read from time to time.

Kevin Rudd is back

You may or may not have noticed that we're having a Federal Election. You may or may not also have noticed that Kevin Rudd is back!

See here.

PS It's funny.

A bit of Yeats

Sailing To Byzantium, by William Butler Yeats


I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations--at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.

II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Pray for Indonesian Christians

The SMH today reports on their persecution by Muslims in cities around Jakarta.

Today would be a good day to pray for these brothers and sisters.

Part time job

I have a part time job as a funeral director's assistant. My first job was today. I drove a car, attended two funerals, and helped lower a body into a grave.

More news to follow; I am also planning, God willing to return to regularly teaching the Bible in some capacity, not too long from now.

Christians building buildings

This letter was in today's SMH amongst some other predictably hostile correspondence:

So a ''coalition of evangelical and pentacostal churches'' is going to build a classroom for $40,000. $40,000? Let's disregard the scientific and educational merits of this arrangement. These people should be put in charge of the schools building program.

Jenny Mooney, Karuah

Read the original story here.

Leave aside for a moment the question of whether churches should build buildings for schools, or whether we like the underlying theology of those doing the funding. This particular story only came to the attention of the SMH because it fits the SMH's current campaign do diminish church involvement in schools within their communities.

But the key statement from the original article, which helps explain the ridiculously low price tag that the amazed letter writer refers to, is that "the donation included materials and labour".

The secular world has no comprehension of the generosity of the Christian community and individuals within it. Stories of this type of generosity could be told a thousand times over, across denominations, and with examples that go well beyond just building projects.

If the offer sounds, in financial terms, too good to be true, it's because it is. Christian generosity far beyond mere goodness. Christian generosity is grace; the grace first shown to us by the Lord Jesus.

Bad news for Holland

Not only did they lose the World Cup but their country is going to sink. In about a hundred years. Maybe.

Should I forgive?

Yes, just as God has forgiven us. Sort of. As Mark Baddeley begins to argue in this most excellent post on the Sola Panel.

Selective schools

Quite a few letters in today's SMH on the subject of selective schools.

We've had to work through decisions about this lately, as Matilda will be going into secondary school next year. Our main consideration, however, has been about whether she will find opportunity to be encouraged in her Christian understanding and living. At one of the schools where she might have gone, we asked the principal about Christian activities and got the response 'Well, er, I think a few of them meet for a barbecue sometimes on a Thursday lunchtime'.

Now I have no issue with state schools or selective schools (I went to James Ruse, which is both, and Fifi went to Sydney Girls, which is both), but if the choice is between that and another school where 1/3 of the students are in voluntary Bible studies, let me say that the choice is a no-brainer.

The idea of coaching kids to get into selective schools seems weirdly obsessive to me, but no more weirdly obsessive than coaching kids to get to a world-class level in sports. My own weird obsession is about fitting my girls for the kingdom of heaven, hence questions to school principals about Christian groups.

Becoming clearer

Thank you to those of you who have been praying about tough decisions. Things are becoming a bit clearer, in a good way, and soon I will be able to give a bit more detail. I am trying to work out, in consultation with friends and family, a more workable arrangement for home and work commitments.

I am hoping that the final arrangements will mean a mixture of campus work, writing, family but as you can no doubt appreciate, these things take time to work out.

Latham on Gillard

Former ALP leader Mark Latham is so full of bile towards his old party that you almost feel that he may be telling the truth as he predicts the fall of Gillard, just so that he gets to say nasty things about other people.

The winner of Mahut-Isner? Tennis reportage

Play resumes at 59 games all in the 5th set.

Geoff Dyer:

If not war, then how about its nearest sporting equivalent, boxing? Recalling the 14th round of the 1975 fight in Manila between Muhammad Ali and George Frazier, Ali's doctor, Ferdie Pacheco, said, "That's what gets people killed in boxing, when the fight becomes more important than life and death." It's never that extreme in tennis and this particular game could never become more important than life itself for the simple reason that it was life itself. They were toiling away not for any ultimate meaning or purpose (as John McEnroe said, after a set-to like this, neither of them have a hope in hell of winning their next-round match) but because, within those white lines, a very simple logic holds sway: he hits a ball and you try to hit it back. And so, through some perverse compatibility – those marriages that last for ages because of an insatiable and shared appetite for bickering – they settled into a tranced deadlock. Normally, a player would be under immense pressure when serving to stay in the tournament but there were no nerves because, after a while – after the first two or three hours, I mean – there was no expectation that anything unusual might happen.

Writing in the Guardian.

PS Oh, you want to know who won? Oh, alright then.

This will be remembered longer

This tennis match will be remembered longer than Kevin Rudd.

Kevin Rudd gone

You heard it here, 593rd. Well, I don't think I could claim first in good conscience, do you? Here, for example, a New Zealand paper reports on it.

Credit to Andrew Bolt, who called it on May 31.

When you break promises, such as canning an Emissions Trading Scheme designed to confront 'the greatest moral challenge of our time'; when you make a lot of your Christian credentials and get publicly exposed as a swear bear, when you invite an ill-thought out fight with the mining lobby; it's hardly surprising that it might come back and bite you.

What is surprising is how quickly it's happened. Just over six months ago, Rudd was unassailable.

UPDATE 1: The SMH report.

Did Kevin Rudd have any friends at all?

UPDATE 2: Nicole Starling gives the right perspective on this.

Tough decisions coming

I have some tough decisions coming. Those in the habit of praying might like to pray that God will, as usual, control all things to his glory and our good.

Romans 8:28 says "And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose."

Here is that verse in its immediate context.

K Rudd

Kevin Rudd, surely not long for this political world.

When left-leaning David Marr kicks off an article in the Good Weekend with a quote from Prime Minister Rudd, full of various brands of expletives, and proceeds to ask whether the man is driven by anger, you know that the press gallery is about to turn. As Andrew Bolt documents.

The SMH letter writers have their say as well, and it doesn't look good for our PM.

What surprises me is the number of Christians who were willing to take his profession of church allegiance at face value, without asking deeper questions about visits to strip clubs and the emerging evidence of a foul temper matched by equally foul language.

I'm disappointed because he seemed to offer a more humane response to asylum seekers arriving by boat; but the detention centres around the place are full to overflowing and the rhetoric has turned to how tough the government is being on these people. That's a flip-flop.

Rules of engagement

If I went in for wordy rules of engagement on blog comments (and I don't), these from Triablogue are absolutely the best I've seen.

What matters matter?

Because I'm on leave and because I want to use the time on leave well, I've made up a list of seventeen review questions about my own life. The aim is to make reasonable progress on all seventeen, in discussion with some of those closest to me, and to come back to them from time to time to see how the answers are changing (or staying the same).

Galatians 2:20 is preamble:

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Here are the 17 questions:

1. What glorifies God?
2. What relationships has God placed me in?
3. Which of these relationships take priority?
4. What roles flow out of those relationships?
5. What activities flow out of those roles?
6. What causes stress?
7. What gives enjoyment?
8. What has significance?
9. What strengths do I/we have?
10. What weaknesses do I we/have?
11. What opportunities do I/we have?
12. What threats do I/we face?
13. Review existing personal mission statement.
14. What is important enough to schedule daily?
15. What is important enough to schedule weekly?
16. What is important enough to schedule monthly?
17. What is important enough to schedule annually?

I'm trying to apply Galatians 2:20 by looking at these questions in the context of daily prayer and Bible reading. Unlike a lot of the good secular advice out there, I want to start with the assumption that Jesus is Lord of all, that I am a helpless sinner in need of his forgiveness, and therefore that any progress I might make in answering big questions about life revolve around Jesus' work as the Lord who has bought me by his death, and is now changing me by his Spirit.

For some reason, and unfortunately, I'm now thinking of George and Step 9. Once I get past that feeling, I'll return to the 17 questions.

Ruby's work

Ruby's teacher started a class blog and put some students' work on it. Here's Ruby's effort:

I think tomatoes don't taste very nice but I think they look COOL!!
They have a deep, brightish colour and a sprout of green on top like a bunch of grass placed right at the top of a grassy, green hill. Maybe if a baby saw a tomato it might think it's a ball and start kicking it around.

As I said on the blog, 'Yay Rubes!'

Getting organized—Dropbox

One of the things I'm doing while on leave is just trying to take a few baby steps towards getting organized. Anyone who has worked with me or had to live with me will be quietly applauding right about now.

Along these lines one of the things that has caused me the greatest joy during the last week or two has been the discovery of this extremely nifty site called Dropbox, which I got onto via Productivity501, which I think I got onto via Unclutterer, which I got onto because I am (half) Swedish and am constitutionally attracted to neatness and order, even if I am not personally capable of achieving it.

Dropbox is totally excellent (so far), and has allowed me to sync *all* my important files (and many unimportant ones) between my laptop and my desktop—and then keep them synched without my needing to pay any attention whatsoever, as well as giving me 2.2+ gig of storage on the internet for free. As far as I can tell they make their profit by me, or people like me deciding that it is too valuable to do without, and so wanting to buy extra storage space. I'm not there yet, but if I decide to get serious about photo and video storage I can see the day coming.

What's more, the other day I was around at my Dad's doing a bit of work for him and realized that I'd forgotten the powercord to my laptop. No problem! I logged onto his computer, found my Dropbox files and was able to work on them over the internet. When I got home and powered up my desktop and laptop, they synched the files I'd been working on with no difficulty whatsoever.

It's a pretty teensy-weensy thing to get excited about in the big scheme of things, but excited I am. Give it a shot yourself, here.

Thankfulness.

Those of you who are prayer supporters of the work at Cumbo ECU will know that I'm current on leave for stress and depression. Things are going well, thanks, God is gracious and the people at AFES have been extraordinarily generous in allowing me an indefinite amount of time to recover; likewise my good buddies at Cumbo ECU have been wonderfully patient and kind both now, and, as you can imagine, in the period leading up to when I went on leave. Not to mention the eternally patient Fifi and the rest of my family—including the church family at St Paul's Carlingford.

I really believe that the way God shows his grace most normally is not through remarkable extra-biblical revelation, nor through astonishing miracles that run against the course of nature, but just through the regular stuff that happens and the people that God chooses to surround us with.

(See Ps 19, Ruth, Job 38-42, Matt 5:45, Acts 8:29 come immediately to mind.)

More thoughts as they come.

Should we apologize for the Crusades?

Justin Taylor links to an interview with Rodney Stark. Justin was interested in the bit where Stark talks about how the US left doesn't seem to make headway amongst evangelical Christians (which Stark qualifies very helpfully), but I was more interested in the bits where he talks about Muslims and the Crusades, for example:

Because the Crusades are often understood within a larger framework that says that Islam is the gentle faith and Christianity the violent one. Karen Armstrong would have us believe that Muhammad was a pacifist. Take Major Nidal Hassan, the man responsible for the Fort Hood massacre. Had an evangelical Christian of the nutty sort gotten up in front of Army psychiatrists and talked about how much he respected people who shot abortionists, he would have been out of the Army an hour later. But everybody tiptoes around the issue of Islam.

Several months after 9/11, former President Clinton gave a speech at Georgetown University in which he apologized for the Crusades. He said we had much to be sorry about, and we bore some of the guilt for sending those airplanes plunging into the Twin Towers. Now, Clinton isn't a nut. He's not an anti-American. He's just been miseducated. He's been told a whole lot of nonsense about the Crusades.

The interview itself is from Patheos.

Ethics classes in schools

Polly Seidler gets a letter in the SMH:

I'm all for competition between SRE and a secularist alternative, but please let the competition be fair.

For each course, let there be the same level of advertising from the school, accurate labelling of the philosophical or religious framework (for example, humanist or secularist ethics), and penalties for misleading claims such as the St James Ethics Centre's (Simon Longstaff's) claim that the ethics pilot would be offered only to children who have opted out of SRE, when in fact it was offered to those on the SRE roll, which forms the crux of SRE providers' complaint.

Polly Seidler, Darlinghurst

(SRE = Special Religious Education, which by law needs to be allowed for in the timetables of public schools in NSW)

Not all miracles

Not all miracles are good miracles:

An 83-year-old Indian holy man who says he has spent seven decades without food or water has astounded a team of military doctors who studied him during a two-week observation period.

From today's Sydney Morning Herald. The man in question says that 'he was blessed by a goddess at a young age, which gave him special powers.'

"23 Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘There he is!’ do not believe it. 24 For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect. 25 See, I have told you beforehand." (Matt 23)

Gordon's quick and easy 5-step recipe book

Gordon's quick and easy 5-step recipe book:

1. Look in fridge.
2. Google fridge contents.
3. If you are reading this in Australia, click on first recipe website with '.au' suffix. Otherwise, just click first recipe website.
4. For Asian food, add word 'Asian' at step 2.
5. Cook.

Special offer!: If you have been helped by this recipe book, please send $35 to my account via Paypal (normally $50!), and I will send you a suggestion for a cover photo you may like to use if you end up printing it out.

Ultrasound before abortion

Oklahoma has passed laws to ensure that women about to have an abortion must see an ultrasound of their baby an hour before the operation.

Here's the New York Times report.

The arguments against include the idea that such a move is unconstitutional because it infringes the physician's right to free speech if he is required to describe the foetus. Which seems a bit desperate, to say the least.

Seems to me the mother is being forced to confront the human identity of the one about to die by her decision, which is no bad thing.

The best thing would be to outlaw abortion altogether, but the current view of the US Supreme Court is that this can't be done.

Marriage license revoked?

Belinda Luscombe wrote a great article for Time magazine on marriage, and taking away people's license to marry for multiple infractions:

In no other area of life can grown people flame out so often and so badly and still get official permission to go ahead and do the same thing again. If your driving is hazardous to those around you, your license is suspended. Fail too many courses at college, and you'll get kicked out. You can lose your medical or law license for a single infraction. Stock analyst Henry Blodgett was prohibited from trading securities forever for publicly saying things he knew weren't true. So why do people who are committed vows abusers keep getting handed marriage licenses at city hall? If batters and violent offenders get only three strikes, why should bad spouses get more?

Of course, a lot of people will say this is nobody's business but the bride and groom's. Plus, it's natural. Evolution favors the alpha-male serial monogamist who bonds with a mate until she gets old and is replaced by a more fertile one. Other primates change partners all the time. But other primates also practice infanticide and poop throwing, and we're not about to sanction either of those. So why are we complicit in allowing people to make big public promises they have demonstrated a chronic inability to keep?

The whole article is here.