Kester Brewin

I’m pleased to be able to announce that The Complex Christ is now going to be released properly in the US. Thank God. No more trips to the post office to mail them over! And no more customs delays! I’ll post a purchase link when I have one. It’s going to be re-named Signs of [...]

You have landed at the site to be for Signs of Emergence, the US release of The Complex Christ. Publication Date: July 07 Please adjust your feeds/links. Food starts soon. Until then…

Organised by the Serpentine Gallery, a group of video artists from China have been given space in and around Battersea Power Station to show their work. It’s one of the best shows I’ve been too for a long time, for a number of reasons. Primarily, the location is iconic. The power station at Battersea stands [...]

[Level 1] [Level 2] Emerging Church: Game or Ritual? As The Believer points out, one aspect of games such as Dungeons and Dragons is that of fantasy. When you enter a game, you are entering ‘role play’ – becoming someone else. Becoming a fantasy self. This is something I have critiqued in more detail here. [...]

[First Level] Game or Ritual? This was the key question addressed in Level One. Lévi-Strauss made the distinction between Games (“they end in the establishment of a difference between players or teams where originally there was no indication of inequality”) and Rituals (“it brings about a union, or in any case, an organic relation between [...]

The ever-brilliant Believer Magazine took ‘Games’ as its theme for the September issue. It’s left me with some thoughts I want to share, probably over the course of a few posts. One of the main articles, by Paul La Farge, was an exploration of Dungeons and Dragons, which, in typical Believer style, meant a gorgeous [...]

History Matters, along with the National Trust and a bunch of other UK organizations have put together ‘One Day in History’. The idea is simple: on October 17th you log on to the History Matters Website and upload your ‘blog’ diary of that day. These mass entries will then be collated and kept as a [...]

Some photos of Michael Cross’ installation at Dilston Grove – a disused shell of a church on the edge of Southwark Park. The main body of the church has been filled with a tank of water. As you step out over it, steps appear from the water. They are meant to disappear behind you, leaving [...]

Ben has some good thoughts here about the search for a ‘just society’ being debased by ‘human rights’. He makes the point that “the ideology of a tolerant society has become a straight jacket that prevents human freedom”. I was reminded by the metaphor a colleague once used about our National Curriculum, and to recycle [...]

Part of my timetable this year is teaching some RE. It’s been a fascinating change. One of the things I’ve been covering is the Genesis story with a group of 11 year olds. Reading through the story and analysing the day-by-day creation, one student commented on the environmental obligation that the text suggested. In the [...]