Roland Boer's Blog, page 87

How not to travel on the Ghan

Some of you may recall our plans for 'The Bible on the Ghan' in March or April of 2011 - a moving seminar on the Ghan train in our own carriage from Adelaide to Darwin through the centre of Australia.

John Lyons passed this one on to me as to how we shouldn't take the journey, or perhaps as a reward for the lamest paper:

A teenage American tourist says he spent two hours clinging to the side of a long-distance train as it sped across the Australian outback in the night.

Chad Vance said he had to l

Eskimaoism

Over there in Greenland, they've just voted some real socialists into government. Inuit Ataqatigiit (Community of the People) won almost 44% of the popular vote. In the proportional representational system in Greenland, they will form government in coalition with one of the smaller parties. Kuupik Kleist, the leader of the party, will become the new premier. He managed a personal vote of more than 25% of the total voting population – a thumping record for anywhere in the world.

So how did this ha

Bible and Critical Theory Seminar 2009 Program

The Grand Hotel, Newcastle, 10-11 July 2009

Friday 10 July

9.00-9.30 am - Registration

9.30-11.00 am

Darren Jorgensen: Simulating the Sacred: Theodore Strehlow's Songs of Central Australia (1971)

Stefan Solomon: Revenant Revelation: Reading the Archive in Carpenter’s Gothic

11.00-11.30 am - Morning Tea

11.30am-12.30pm

Keynote: Marion Maddox: Faith in Our Leaders

12.30-2.00pm - Lunch

2.00-3.30 pm

Matthew Chrulew: Suspicion and Love

Tamara Prosic: Orthodox Christianity, Utopia and Socialism

3.30-4.00 - Afterno

Stalin's Moustache makes the comix

Thanks to Missives from Marx for the tip: you'll find Stalin's Moustache has now made its way into a comic here. NB: In order to get the context, you'll need to check out one or two earlier strips in the series.[image error]

Death by masturbation

The church was right after all - masturbation kills.

Take the case of David Carradine, who was found dead in a hotel in Thailand. Now, it's usually sad when someone dies, but the old bugger was 72 and by the sound of things, it was a reasonably pleasurable passing.

He was found in his hotel room with a rope around his neck and penis. As the police observed: 'There was a rope tied around his neck and another rope tied at his sex organ, and the two ropes were tied together and hung in the closet'.

I

Our Christian Prime Minister

I've got a new piece in New Matilda called 'Our Christian Prime Minister' ...

... and I think Deleuze, Guattari and I have broken the back of the poor scapegoat (we've been riding it for a while).[image error]

Papers and Abstracts for Bible and Critical Theory Seminar, 10-11 July 2009

In a room to ourselves down at the local watering hole (The Grand Hotel, Newcastle), we'll be listening to and discussing the following papers over 10-11 July. It's great to see a swag of new faces and papers.

Holly Randall-Moon
The secular state of the nation: sovereignty, secularism and law

What does it mean to say that the Australian state is a secular one? Secular law typically begins when a state has no religious competitor for authority. For this reason, it can be said that the Australian sta

Opinionated

I once thought that age was the natural accompaniment of opinionated dogmatics, older men who seemed to forego wisdom in favour of prognosticating on the world. But then I met a man in his late 80s with the most open mind, eager to explore new ideas, and I met a few too many younger people whose minds were already set. So it seems as though age is no barrier, that even those whose minds should be supple and open have already fixed into ideas that will brook no other opinion. Or is just that when

Deleuze and Guattari stumble across the ritual of atonement

Stoned out of their minds, Gilles and Felix have just stumbled across the mythical ritual of atonement from Leviticus 16. Not such a bad way to interpret the Bible ...

The complete system, then, consists of the paranoid face or body of the despot-god in the signifying center of the temple; the interpreting priests who continually recharge the signified in the temple, transforming it into signifier; the hysterical crowd of people outside, clumped in tight circles, who jump from one circle to anoth

The 'urgies' of Régis Debray

Here's the extraordinary Regis Debray, after he spent time in a Bolivian prison reading only religious literature:

‘“Ologies” are explained by “urgies.” An “ideology” is a sociurgy gone cold. … Our theoretical task relates to the “urgy” …’ (Critique of Political Reason 1983, p. 169).

And

‘If you want to know what something consists of, ask yourself what it resists. Organize a biscuit. A sweater. A cigarette. A bout of hypochondria. A commando’ (Critique of Political Reason 1983, p. 267).

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