Medallists
Congratulations to Morag Fraser, the former editor of Eureka Street, who was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. The many community groups whom Morag has encouraged and supported will feel honoured by the award. Eureka Street basks in the reflected sunlight both of Morag’s medal, and of the AM awarded to Fr Kevin Mogg, the uncle of the present editor, for his contribution over many decades to social welfare and prison chaplaincy.
Splitting hairs
Casuistry is the art of applying firm laws to slippery situations. Jesuits were once famed (notorious) for their skill at it. It often produces a more flexible practice than we might expect. (Did eating at 12.15am, for example, break the fast from midnight once required for communion? Yes, said the letter of the law. No, said the casuists, not at least if you lived at Ceduna, where real midnight came later than the official clocks proclaimed.)
The great exponents of casuistry, however, are the Orthodox Jewish Rabbis. Their law prohibits married women from displaying their hair. This, being culturally awkward in Western societies, led the casuists to approve wearing wigs. Now the best (and most expensive) wigs are made of human hair, and come from India. This origin, however, has raised questions for the Rabbis: Indian women have their hair cut in Hindu temples. This fact has led the most authoritative Rabbis to ban Indian wigs on the grounds they are so intimately associated with idolatry. The casuists, undefeated, now reflect on whether the hairdressers had religious or secular things in mind as they sat in the temple cutting hair.
Darwin and the dinosaurs
Christians also struggle with culture. In Florida, many Christians were disappointed with the dinosaur exhibition at Disneyland, because it portrayed the reign of dinosaurs as predating human beings. So they opened their own Creationist Adventure Land, in which dinosaurs are shown to have been created on the sixth day of creation. Souvenirs include fishy T-shirts, depicting Darwin at the moment of being engorged by Truth. The struggle between God and the forces of mammon goes on in the Park office as well as in the grounds. The taxation people came calling to seize documents. They claimed that the Park had paid no taxes. The park owners retorted that churches owed no taxes.
Pretty pollies
Election fever and the polls threaten. Polls come from an old English word,