So there's this art prize for religious artworks and some of the entrants include Mary in a Burqa and a picture of Jesus that morphs into Osama.
Past President of the Uniting Church, the Reverend Professor James Hare, thinks that the artworks are offensive. Both our leading national politicians jumped on the bandwagon to criticise, without of course doing anything like looking at the artworks!
But I must say that I thought they were great! Artwork is meant to make us think, to provoke and to arrest interest, to juxtapose unlikely elements in order to cause people to contemplate. I think both pieces provoke genuine searching about the way in which different religions or groups of people view people like Mary, Jesus or Osama. We are provoked to consider both the similarities and the differences between Jesus and Osama, their lives and ways of achieving goals. We are made to wonder how images of Mary are used to support cultural norms or religious dogmas in Islamic or Christian contexts. We are led to think about the veil and what it represents positively or negatively.
Personally I think it's great that artists like this push us to explore the unexplored boundaries of thought, and I wish that we had politicians who would more often give a reasoned response and less often give a knee-jerk response.