Another meditative Sunday musing, and the pond discovers a desire to snip angry Sydney Anglicans where it hurts ...

The news this week is that the Pope is in hot water with conservatives.

The silly old Pontif dared to have a few words to say about global capitalism, the trickle down non-effect, and other sorts of rhetorical tricks favoured by the crony commentariat - you can read about it in Fox Columnist: Pope Francis A 'Disaster' for Catholic Church, while as usual the pond recommends The New Yorker, in this case John Cassidy's Pope Francis's Challenge to Global Capitalism.

The pond loves it when someone in the church actually remembers what Christ said:

Just then a man came up to Jesus and asked, “Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?” "Why do you ask me about what is good?” Jesus replied. “There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, keep the commandments.” 
“Which ones?” he inquired. 
 Jesus replied, “‘You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother,’ and ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’" 
“All these I have kept,” the young man said. “What do I still lack?” 
Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” 
When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth. 
Then Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. 
Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Sheesh, damned pinko pervert leftie progressive socialist commie bastard. What's the odds that Jesus was also against a decent frock?

Is it any wonder that they've taken the Pellists off the revolving digital splash of doom at the top of the page of the Sunday Terror?

Meanwhile, the angry Sydney Anglicans are up to their old tricks, and seeking to gain credibility for the bible by linking it up with literature, with Michael Jensen devising a course involving The Bible and Literature.

It should go without saying that the reading list is strictly written by men - your Blakes, your Bunyans, your Bill Shakspere, your John Updikes and C. S. Lewis's and your Dantes, and Graham Greenes, and so on, because let's face it, women have absolutely nothing to offer.

Why there's not even a book on why Sydney Anglicans Refuse to Cite Women Authors and Proud Of It.

Damn you difficult women, damn you pesky gays.

But the real problem the pond has is the way that Jensen coattails on literature, without reference to either the visual arts or the movies.

Why is it that only an angry Anglican could deliver a course without reference to the pictures, either still or moving? Is that graven images thing still sticking in the craw?

What about Cecil B. de Mille's The Ten Commandments, what about Samson and Delilah, what about The Robe, what about Ben Hur or the other epic bouts of visual vulgarity? (Naturally to help out Greg Hunt there's a wiki listing them here, and another about the bible in film here.)

Will Rusty join them with Noah, a film that looks as risible and as astonishingly bad as anything crafted in the 1950s? Don't take the pond's word for it. If your TV system doesn't give you the latest trailers, give the poor old Fairfaxians a hit and check out the teaser trailer.

This is surely where the heart of the angry Sydney Anglicans lie, back there with the garden of Eden, and the filthy vile woman Eve that caused all the fuss, and the serpent and yadda yadda ...

Oh and a genocidal god, handing out the first recorded genocide in literature ... because you can never have enough killing and mass murder, can you?

Poor old Darren Aronofsky, looks like he's done a John Huston, and way before he needed to ...

But speaking of the angry Sydney Anglicans, Phillip Jensen also recently turned up with an angry denunciation of outsourcing, in Outsourcing Life. Except that:

While it is fashionable to speak of outsourcing, there's nothing new in it - nor is it an evil that must be resisted. The whole of society is built upon outsourcing.

Yep, you guessed it, it's just a preacher's ploy, the oldest trick in the book. Take any word or any concept and you can lather up a biblical storm around it:

While it is fashionable to speak of the bible in movies, there's nothing new in it - nor is it an evil that must be resisted. The whole of Hollywood is built upon sticking Rusty in bad movies.

And so on.

There's only one thing to note, and it's not that Jensen goes on to denounce certain forms of outsourcing:

If our employment, necessary for all our outsourcing, requires us to work during school holidays why not outsource child-minding during holidays? Would it not be cheaper in the long run to employ a nanny, to go with our other domestic servants, to take our children to all the after-school extracurricular activities that are a must for the right-thinking aspiring middle-class? Ultimately, it may be cheaper and easier to put the children into boarding school - though presumably an orphanage is cheaper still!

Indeed, indeed, but why not instead just put the little darlings into the St Andrews Cathedral school, which shockingly offers before and after school care, and school holiday/vacation care.

Your friendly local provider of outsourcing facilities for the right-thinking aspiring middle class ...

But no, it wasn't that, though hypocrisy or simply befuddlement is always appealing, it was this cri de coeur of anguished guilt and pain and suffering, which is extremely relevant in the middle of this cricketing season:

I assume it is because I taught my son cricket in the backyard rather than paying for him to get professional training in a cricket academy, that he is not playing Sheffield Shield and Test Cricket. But nothing can replace the fun we had playing together: climbing fences to retrieve our sixes, replacing broken windows at mid-wicket, taking the "impossible" caught-and-bowled, sympathizing over the bruised shin. You cannot outsource the quality of life any more than you can outsource living itself.

Just that one par could keep Freud going for a month ...

It just doesn't sound like that much fun, at least not the bruised shins and the broken windows or the climbing fences and bruising the shins ... and then there's the not moving on to becoming a professional cricketer, and learning to speak in grunts or laughing like Kerry O'Keefe.

If it's any consolation, it could simply be that people who don't make it to the top of any given sport might actually just lack the talent, and the skill and the ability. The pond, for example, plays tennis with the grace of a waddling duck, and the skill and dexterity of an elephant, and no amount of professional training in a tennis academy could sort it out ... not even for a game of social tennis ...

Such is life, or perhaps, such is English cricket ...

If only the angry Sydney Anglicans could be persuaded to get over their love of genocide, women and gay bashing, fear of outsourcing, and yearning to be a professional cricketer.

Still it makes it easy to find stills designed to fill the average Sydney Anglican with a deep fear. Snip their hair Hedy, snip them where it hurts!