Kester Brewin

Due to server costs etc from the publisher’s end, the original site for the Complex Christ is going to be taken down. The url http://www.thecomplexchrist.com will now point to this blog. Hence the php discussion boards there will be closed. Updates to the blog to accommodate this: ‘Explore the Book section’ added left, with links [...]

I’m really not sure anymore. Not that I particularly used to be, though it’s something I’ve enjoyed doing myself in the past. And that’s what worries me: people who do it, enjoy it. The select chosen few get their weekly 20 minutes to show us how clever they are at public speaking. If we were [...]

David Sheppard, the recently deceased England cricket captain come radical Bishop, once said that ‘advertising is tantalising the poor.’ I’m wondering if we need to go further than that. For those who can remember far enough back to ’3 Feet High and Rising’, you’ll remember that "We’ll be back, right after these messages." Not any [...]

May sees the creative act as an encounter between two poles. A dialectical process between the subjective pole – the artist – and the objective pole – that which the artist is contemplating. It is in the moment of encounter between them that newness occurs. He quotes Archibald MacLeish on this, who sees these two [...]

As requested, (see previous post) the files from the dedication service we wrote. For background info, it was held in a CofE church one Saturday (ie not in a normal service) and was led by the Vicar… It happened literally the day before the last Vaux wake, so was in the Spirit of Vaux, though [...]

Interesting piece on the radio this morning about the rise of road-side ‘shrines’ in the UK. Flowers, weathered photos, crosses peek out from lamp-posts and hedgerows, marking sites of fatal crashes and lives cut short. One man interviewed had lost his nephew in a car crash, and now visited the site daily, keeping the flowers [...]

“The poet”, Rollo May writes, “is a menace to conformity. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists are the possible destroyers of our nicely ordered systems. For the creative impulse is the speaking of the voice and the expressing of the forms of the preconscious and unconscious; and this is, by [...]

//// The clear-up begins. The autopsy. The media attempt to deflate the pompous politicians in their teflon suits, who hope the dirt won’t stick, that they won’t be a casualty. The volunteers still up to their necks in filth, delicately orange-crossing the ex-houses housing the inflated bodies, hoping the dirt won’t stick, trying to enumerate [...]

May again: “It often occurs to me that people living in our modern, hectic civilization, amid the constant din of radio and TV, subjecting themselves to every kind of stimulation whether of the passive sort of TV or the more active sort of conversation, work and activity, that people with such constant preoccupations find it [...]

More from ‘The Courage to Create‘ by Rollo May – an excellent book on the psychology of creativity. May was conducting some research into the roots of anxiety, and based his study on groups of teenage mothers in a shelter in New York. He was pretty sure his hypothesis – that their anxiety would be [...]