Current Issue

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

EDITORIAL 3

WHEN SCIENCE BECOMES SACRED by Judith Keller 5

DARE TO IMAGINE A LIFE SHAPED BY GRACE by Sarah Bachelard 11

A CONVERSATION WITH TIM HOLLO 21

WHAT THE EYE SEES by Toni Hassan 27

STIRRING THE POT by Zeny Giles 34

UNITING A DIVIDED WORLD by Frank Ross 36

IAN McKEWAN'S "WHAT WE CAN KNOW" reviewed by Chris Kearney 39

TRIBUTES FOR JOHN FOULCHER 41

EREMOS INFORMATION AND MEMBERSHIP 43

EDITORIAL

Thank you for welcoming me into your rare Christian community as your new Editor. My sincere thanks to John Foulcher for his support with the transition. I look forward to getting to know the community and shepherding rich conversations that explore spirituality in Australia today; diving into the depths of theology and faith in the Ultimate Mystery, to help people grow, even remain buoyant. 

It’s early days as I feel my way. I can say that my approach with EREMOS aims to be a blend of the ABC’s Australian Story and The Upper Room journal, opening up questions and yarns that have the potential to shift discourse from debate to deep listening and contemplative action. I will sometimes embrace what appears controversial, not just for the sake of it, but to name lived experiences, the wonder and the wounds, in order to walk towards wisdom. 

In this edition, author Tim Hollo, a community organiser of Jewish heritage, shares some hard realities. I don’t think we can avoid Jewish history and contemporary experiences of it if we are to honestly engage the current theme at EREMOS - Without judgement: Conversations across divides. 

Elections, contests of ideas, tend to make divides more visible, in the present, on and offline. I felt this as a volunteer with a non-partisan group in the recent state election in South Australia. Don’t waste your vote in the Senate was the group’s message. The assumed conditions for having a good conversation (being attentive to connect, listen and share with low judgement) were thin in that environment but I was struck by how often people were not open to any conversation, let alone a chat about the state senate. They had made up their minds and “all politicians were corrupt anyway”.  I heard grievance. Across politics, anger is common, ecumenical in its expression, but one might hope for a vision that connects us all.

Behind increasing discord is the role of mobile screen technology which feeds off our anger and pushes fast and reactive commentary, undermining a call in Scripture to seek to understand rather than be understood. This is highlighted by Hollo’s experience, and touched on in Frank Ross’ summary of a social fabric project in the US where unfiltered politics has gone viral. I also explore digital culture in What the Eye Sees. Being spacious with the present moment and finding the transcendent in ordinary life, I contend, bumps into the commercial imperatives of Big Tech and its evangelists who profit from discord.

A subscriber asked me, ‘What divide or divides are you wanting to bridge?’ Good question. The divides appear, firstly, within ourselves: niggling conflict about how we show up authentically (understanding the Gospels at the level of our identity), then in families where strains, especially between generations, are common. Deepening inequalities and the general pace of change have also played roles in contemporary anxieties and divides, pitting community against community, gender against gender, First Nations against settlers, stateless people against citizens of state, recent citizens against established citizens, nation state against nation state, and corporations against the planet that sustains us. Then there is division between denominations (dogmatic and literal versus metaphorical interpretations of religious text) and religions, even those with the same historical origins. 

At the root of divides, I wonder, isn’t there often a sense of unquestioned or unreasonable ownership and anxiety over a resource or what feels lost or receding? Related to that, Sarah Bachelard provides us with her Marian Lecture titled Dare to Imagine a Life Shaped by Grace. Here, she explores how one’s receptivity can make way for life to move beyond self-pity and woundedness. 

Celebrated author Ian McEwan notes that we live our lives between the dead and the yet to be born. In this latest novel, What We Can Know, reviewed by Christine Kearney, McEwan lets the past, present and future address each other across the barriers of time in the shadow of climate change as a profound spiritual disease. 

Judith Keller offers her story of finding cosmology and bridging a perennial divide: science v spirituality. The context she explores could hardly be wider, situating humanity within the evolutionary/ecological life processes on Earth, and the planet, sitting as it does, off-centre in an expanding universe.  

Speaking of expanding… Please share your experiences and your responses to any Eremos article, poem or review through the Letters page, so we grow our conversation muscles together.

One of the shared goals of the EREMOS team is growing the magazine’s readers. I want to encourage you to consider how this little magazine is a sustainable enterprise, ongoing. Consider how to share this offering as an antidote to an intolerant world where Christian nationalism is on the rise. If you receive PDFs of EREMOS, why not offer your favourite edition to a friend and invite them to be a member, or purchase a subscription as a gift to someone? 

Again, thank you for trusting me with this. I look forward to a fruitful partnership as we share our common life.

Toni Hassan
Editor