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Keywords: Herod

  • AUSTRALIA

    Gospel stories of the security state

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 17 December 2015
    19 Comments

    The pastel coloured domesticity of the images of Jesus' birth does not do justice to its context. Herod's sending out first his spies to find where the Messiah was to be born, and then his soldiers to eradicate the threat the child posed to national security, may not appear on Christmas cards, but they frame the story of Jesus' birth. The disjunction between the tenderness of the Christmas stories and the brutality of their public context is mirrored in the conflict between the humane values of the Gospel and the harsh instrumental values of the public world in any age.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The flight into Egypt

    • Grant Fraser, Anne Ramsay and Rory Harris
    • 15 December 2015
    1 Comment

    Behind them that beast of prey, that Herod, was still glaring doom from his trees of thorn, eyes bulging like a fox. And so, by night, Joseph squired their secret way, prayed the morning kind, prayed empty the brigand-haunted roads. Each day they made another cold remove, with the infant swaddled close, and their way marked by quiet nurseries of straw. Joseph kept close his thoughts, measured each horizon, always with the rumour of dark hoofbeats thrumming in his mind.

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  • RELIGION

    Church plays part of Christmas villain

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 19 December 2013
    14 Comments

    Christmas tells the story of a God who entrusted Christ as a baby safely to the care of Mary and Joseph in a markedly hostile secular environment. The stories told at the Royal Commission are of parents who entrusted their children unsafely to the care of representatives of the Church. The face of Herod in our day is not that of a persecutor who threatens the church from without. It is that of a minister of the church who betrays from within.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Australia's refugee bastardry is biblical

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 12 September 2011
    30 Comments

    The stories of Jesus' trial highlight the triumph of expediency over legality and morality. The Malaysia solution and the scramble to restore it contains detailed similarities. The people of the time are now remembered principally for their participation in an act of bastardry.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A Muslim's view of Jesus the refugee

    • Irfan Yusuf
    • 22 December 2010
    17 Comments

    Jesus was born into a family of internal refugees. His mother had to seek refuge, fleeing Herod's nasty dictatorship. It's uncertain whether she used the services of satanic people smugglers.

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