Beyond Abrahamism : a fresh reading of the Tanakh traditions respecting Lot, Moab and Ammon

At the heart of this study is my interest in the way in which a religious community establishes its sense of identity and its boundaries in relation to other groups. I explore the case of Israel's attitude towards her eastern neighbours, the Moabites and Ammonites, as portrayed in Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. Most commentary from the last one hundred years privileges one particular view of Moab and Ammon as traditional enemies of Israel. I aim to show the validity of readings of the biblical accounts that reveal a more complex relationship between Israel and her neighbours. Tanakh exhibits a dialectic between eirenic and hostile viewpoints. The stories of Abraham and Lot, who are presented as ancestors of Israel and of Moab and Ammon, to some degree represent Israel’s understanding of her neighbours. Conventional commentaries take for granted the accepted orthodoxy of Judaism, Christianity and Islam concerning Abraham and his significance in terms of faith and righteousness and blessing and covenant. As none of these notions is specifically linked to Lot at any point, he is treated as a pathetic figure and remains secondary in conventional commentary. Many commentaries denigrate the character of Lot, often in direct comparisons with Abraham. My reading of the texts of Genesis attempts to free the story of Lot from the constraints imposed by the way the story of Abraham functions. A careful reading of the Genesis account shows that Lot and Abraham exhibit similar elements of moral ambiguity, and Genesis contains no statement that condemns Lot on moral or religious grounds. Genesis 19, the single narrative in which Lot appears independently of Abraham, participates in the dialectic elsewhere in Tanakh. On the basis of a consistent pattern of action and speech throughout the first portion of Genesis 19, I advance my own original conception of the eirenic viewpoint of the narrator concerning Lot and his relationship to the divine. I attempt to demonstrate ways in which the story of Lot critiques or deconstructs the dominant ideology centred upon Abraham. My conception of the particular interests of the compiler of Genesis 19 is supported by several intertextual studies. These include the traditions of Sodom and of Zoar, the story of hospitality in Judges 19, the story of the deluge (Genesis 6-9) and stories of women who, like Lot’s daughters, act to continue the family line. In a treatment of the history of Lot traditions, I find evidence to separate the story of Lot from the work of the Yahwist. I consider whether the stories of Lot have a derivation east of the Jordan and whether the stories were of particular interest to the Deuteronomists. In the final chapter of this study, I focus on the main themes of the narratives concerning Lot and Abraham, and Moab and Ammon and Israel. The question of social boundaries arises in regard to many of these themes, such as the interaction of female and male, the role of wealth, the relation of city and country, kinship, and rights to land settlement. In this way, the treatment of Lot and Abraham in Tanakh and in subsequent traditions offers a perspective upon the formation of identity in the contemporary world of religious plurality.

Hunt angels

Rupert Kathner (Ben Mendelsohn) always had stars in his eyes. He wanted to make movies and wanted the whole world to see them. It was at a screening of a pilot for one of his films to studio execs that he met a woman who would change his life. Alma Brooks (Victoria Hill) was working as a secretary at the studio when she met Rupe. When they paired up, a revolutionary filmmaking duo was born. Despite opposition from the Police Commissioner himself, they produced the first true crime movie ever made in Australia: 'The Pyjama Girl Murder Case'. In the end, even the Commissioner gave it his blessing and it was an instant success. In fact, every film they ever made was shown on the big screen. Over the course of 15 years together, these mavericks managed to make a remarkable nineteen movies

Framing the discourses of harm and loss: a case study of power relations, mobile phones, and children in Australia

The current penetration of mobile phones in Australia is 92% and it records one of the world’s highest rates of ownership among children under 18. The paper reviews the literature on mobile phones and Australian children and examines the various discourses dominating the public debates; the systematic frames used in these discourses; and whose interests are served in the process. The frames discussed fall under the optimistic (gains); pessimistic (losses, costs or harms); pluralistic (technology per se is neutral but how it is used matters); historical development (skills learnt and the importance of using mobiles); futuristic predictions (promises and dangers for the future); current uses (connectivity, convergence and interactivity); and the techno-realist view (as a mixed blessing) views of technology. Taking the critical perspective and borrowing from Joshua Meyrowitz, the paper illustrates how mobile phones have eroded parental power over how, when, where and with whom their children communicate, surpassing adult supervision, intervention or knowledge, while at the same time, becoming a ‘digital leash’ for parents to re-establish their control an d an ‘umbilical cord’ for their off spring to remain connect! ed with parents, at all times.

Infanticide and anti-imperialism in Pasolini's Medea

Euripides’ Medea has been reinvented several times in the twentieth century. While some modern Medeas reiterate conservative tropes of the monstrous feminine or the evil of the cultural Other, the infanticidal figure of Medea is also open to more politically progressive usages. Indeed, several modern versions of Medea are overt in their politicisation of the problems of colonialism and/or institutionalised gender dissymmetry: the Medeas of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heiner Müller, Christa Wolf, and more recently the indigenous Australian version by Wesley Enoch, for example, enact resistance to the interpretative closures that construct Medea as a caricature of the evil Other. But what lends the Euripidean narrative to such politicisations? And what role does the infanticide have in modern politicisations of the narrative?

To answer these questions, the paper examines Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film Medea from his Trilogy of Life series. Focussing on Pasolini’s representation of Medea’s signature act, maternal infanticide, the paper outlines the complex ways in which this motif is integral to the film’s contestation of imperialist ideologies, values and practices, and its affiliations with Marxist and feminist criticism. Drawing upon theories of subjectivity and postcolonial discourse, the paper argues that the infanticide motif is politically enabling precisely because it exalts the politics of the ways in which subjectivity is defined. That is, the apparent blessing of the sun god over Medea’s murderous act speaks to the ways in which subjectivity is formed by the symbolic order: a point recalling Medea’s earlier articulation that society systematically demonises and oppresses foreigners and women. The films representation of infanticide, then, can be read in the light of the narratives politicisation of the discourses that define subjectivity and the hegemonic practices that subjugate and dominate the subaltern. So, while Medea’s infanticide is sometimes dismissed as a demonising representation of the cultural and sexual Other, it can also be read as the key to understanding Medea’s political radicality, drawing attention to the discourses of rights-bearing subjectivity in both its ancient and modern incarnations.

Pasolini’s project of anti-colonialism, however, is fraught with certain paradoxes. To politicise the predicament of imperial subjugation, Pasolini’s Medea places the burden of authenticity on the cultural and sexual Other, on Medea - and on Medea’s culture of origin, Colchis. In this way, Pasolini’s Medea mobilises the problematic discourses of ‘First World’ modernity that define the ‘Third World’ as the carrier of the symbolic burden of authenticity as well as of ‘the sacred.’ Pasolini’s Medea thus offers an overly schematic and abstract representation of the relationship between coloniser and colonised. However, Pasolini’s Medea is not simply or finally a reification of these discourses; rather it strategically mobilises them – just as it strategically mobilises the monstrous act of infanticide – to make its political point.

Mobile phones and children : an Australian perspective

Mobile phones in Australia record one of the world’s highest rates of ownership among children under 18. This paper examines issues of mobile phones and Australian children and the various discourses (systematic frames) used in discussing their effects. These are the optimistic (gains); pessimistic (losses, costs or harms); pluralistic (technology per se is neutral but how it is used matters); historical development (importance and skills learnt); futuristic predictions (promises and dangers); current uses (connectivity, convergence and interactivity); and techno-realist view (as a mixed blessing). Taking the Justification View of Technology that sees technological adoption as a gamble and borrowing from Joshua Meyrowitz, it examines how mobile phones have eroded parental power over how, when, where and with whom their children communicate, while at the same time, becoming a ‘digital leash’ for parents to re-establish their control and an ‘umbilical cord’ of children to remain connected with parents at all times.

A mixed blessing of lifespan heterogeneity

Human mortality data reveal that life expectancy in industrialized countries has been converging to a common value. Yet, significant variations in the distributions of adult life-table ages at death among some developed countries have also been observed. This paper, largely motivated by Japan’s mortality data, presents a general equilibrium, overlapping-generations model that assesses the welfare effects of the mean-preserving declines in the variance of the distribution of adult ages at death. Our quantitative exercise reveals that for a given value of the economy-wide life expectancy, the individual welfare effects due to switching from high to low-variance steady states are length of life-dependent, quite sensitive to the average economy-wide retirement age, and strongly influenced by associated changes in the labor supply, factor prices, and lifetime earnings.

Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS): Is It a Curse or a Blessing for the Australian Home Loan Market? A Natural Experiment

The Australian home loan market has seen a significant and persistent boom over more than two decades. Theextant literature exploring the underlying factors explaining this boom has predominantly looked at thedemand side rather than the supply side. In this paper, we look at a major supply-side issue, the introductionof mortgage-backed securities and its likely impact on the home loan market. In doing so, we have developeda mathematical model that theorises this likely relationship. Our mathematical model predicts possibleexistence of an unstable equilibrium in the home loan market in the presence of mortgage-backed securities.We have subsequently backed up our theoretical exercise with sound empirical evidence acquired andanalysed as a natural experiment in the Australian scenario using quarterly market data on home loans andmortgage-backed securities data for a 36-year period from 1976 to 2012. Using unknown structural breaktests, we have identified significant breaks around late 1992 to mid-1995, clearly indicating that there weresignificant changes in the housing market due to the introduction of mortgage-backed securities in early1993. We have also performed a stability test confirming that under certain conditions this market canbecome unstable.

Economic freedom and productivity growth in resource-rich economies

The focus of this paper is to test whether free market institutions that protect property rights and support freedom of choice and voluntary exchange can change the curse of natural resources into a blessing. To examine the above question, this paper uses the Fraser Institute's economic freedom index and its five sub-indices, namely government size, property rights, access to sound money, freedom to trade, and setting proper regulations. Using data from 99 sample countries over the period 1970-2010, the system GMM estimates suggest that the negative growth effects of resource rents may turn positive in countries with greater economic freedom.