// Thursday, 30 March 2006

A person of interest

I am not sure why this piece of “investigative” journalism made page three of the Sydney Morning Herald—perhaps because I am not a regular reader of the paper. But I was flipping through this lunchtime, read the article, spotted Gordon Cheng and recognised the name immediately as an editor associated with Matthias Media. Yep, so what?

As far as I understand it, Matthias Media is a non-denominational evangelical publisher, publishing material written by people from a range of denominations and independent churches. I subscribed to The Briefing for a year and have a few of their beautiful, matte-covered books in my library. True, it perhaps represents material disproportionately from a Sydney Anglican origin, but I can forgive that—they are the largest, most vocal and best mobilised for public comment of our brothers and sisters in Australia. But it can hardly be described as an “Anglican public relations organ”.

Mr Cheng expressed a (sole) dissenting opinion and proposed some intelligent debate in what seems otherwise to be a boring forum for anonymous randoms to exchange emotional “arguments” for the ordination of women. I note that Mr Cheng is the only contributor mentioned in the article who posted their comments under the real, full name.

The article does not mention why it is so worthy of report that one Australian Christian posted a few comments in an offshore, informal forum that disputed a poorly written status quo. If something about disclosure is implied, they would seem to have misunderstood and then misrepresented what Mr Cheng does. Would it have mattered if “St Cecilia” was an activist for women’s ordination somewhere? This clumsiness only seems to confirm Mr Cheng’s gloomy but well-founded prescience: “It’s a typical Sydney Morning Herald wind-up—let’s get the nasty evangelicals.”

Which relates to some thoughts I have about V for Vendetta—what on earth sort of picture have we presented to the world that makes them think us so cold and cruel?

Update: Yep.

Deborah at 11:57 AM | Thought | 0 Comments »

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