I was probably around fifteen years old when I experienced the death of the first relative I knew. He was my mother’s father – a grandfather I knew only for the less than two years we lived with my grandparents in the south of Nederland when I was around four. Even then I only knew him distantly. When he died, I had been in Australia for about seven years.
“ ‘Grandpa, get a life!’ That’s what Jed said to me the other day.”
“They’re all the same, these youngsters. They forget we have navigated our way through decades while they have less than two and they think they know it all.”
How do we negotiate the path between sanity and insanity, between right and wrong, between good and not-good, between the empowering and the disempowering?
I live in a well-to-do country and I live comfortably. A constant question for me is: how much am I willing to compromise and how much am I willing to give up for the benefit of the ‘environment’?
The good man Jesus and the scoundrel Christ
Philip Pullman
Text 2011
ISBN: 9781921758096
$23.95
245 pp
“Each of us can interpret a story in a different way, depending on our own unique life experiences. We may disagree with a story, agree with it, or learn something new from it. An author usually has a purpose for the story, and there are always some sort of underlying values behind the text he writes.”1