Zadok Perspectives Issue 81

Scripture as Literature by Sally Cloke

The Simpsons, Scripture and Postmodern Youth by Andrew Stewart

How do you read me? by Miriam & Phillip Sampson

Stories to live by: reading the bible in the new millenium by Ched Myers

Ethical Investment and the case for linguistic diversity by Micheal Singh and Chris Scanlon

Bonhoeffer
Review by Bill James

All our times
Review by Jennifer Collier

What some of you were: Stories about Christians and Homosexuality
Review by Jill Firth

The cost of moral leadership: the spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Review by Doug Hynd

Rethinking Religion: exploratory investigations
Review by Mick Pope

Jesus and the politics of interpretation
Review by Jill McCoy

George Pell / A long way from home: Why the Australian Catholic Church is in Crisis
Review by Andrew Hamilton

S128 Media Myths & the Middle East: the Achilles heel of Christians
by Christopher Davey
Summer 2003

Under the Bush administration, Christians are having unprecedented influence on Middle Eastern politics. Where Palestinian-Israeli conflict is concerned, the US Christian approach is driven by theology and a number of myths reinforced in the media. The paper addresses a number of these myths reivealing a gulf between reality and theological expectation. The reality is well understood by many inhabitants of the Middle East who now hold the moral high ground, and with some justification, view Christianity as morally deficient.

This paper has been revised since publication. Click HERE for the new version.

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S129 It's all f***ed without Yahweh: The message of Hosea 4:1-4
by David Collis
Summer 2003

Hosea's message is one of humanity and authenticity. It calls people to recognise the destructiveness of a false life and turn to a true life of understanding and faithful relationship. Hosea assumes that knowledge and identity are always formed and sustained in real relationships. Hosea 4:1-14, speaks this widsom by looking at its opposite. To fail to know Yahweh, Hosea argues, is to fail to know - human understanding stays close to the surface, lacking organic depth and, taken to its logical extreme, leads to the absurdities of idol worship. Hosea's call to repantance is not at all a pietisitic choice of religious observance, but a choice between coherence and fragmentation, relationship and manipulation, real understanding and broken minds and, ultimately, life and death.