Kester Brewin

On a slightly behind the scenes UK Emerging Church discussion forum, the issue of leadership/ordination/vocation has reared its ugly head. I’ve posted on this fairly extensively before (post here / Self-Organizing Leadership series here), and I’ve a fuller article coming out on the subject in Relevant Leader shortly but wanted to just re-iterate some key [...]

I went to hear Dave Eggers in conversation with Valentino Achak Deng at the ICA this evening. It was wonderful, moving and sad and funny. Deng was one of the Lost Boys in Sudan. After his town was pillaged by militias, he got separated from his family and joined 4000 or so other young boys [...]

‘Thought for the Day’ this morning was an excellent piece  by Martin Palmer. MP’s have recently voted to exclude themselves from their own Freedom of Information legislation – a move that has angered many. It seems the law-makers want everyone else to be accountable save themselves. Palmer made an interesting connection with Abraham’s bartering with [...]

Mary Douglas, whose work ‘Purity and Danger’ I am heavily indebted to for the ‘dirty’ bits of Signs of Emergence, has died. Obituary here. "In 1966, Douglas published her most celebrated work, Purity and Danger: an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. This book is best remembered for its stylish demonstration of the ways [...]

Following up on the recent post about CCTV, I just had to post this story. Am I alone in thinking this is seriously worrying? That we are sleepwalking into a Stasi-style surveillance society? Get your catapults and air guns loaded my friends, the battle starts here. Technorati: BBC | CCTV | Drone | Police | [...]

In a great piece of polemic, Julian Gough has written in Prospect this month about the tendency for Western literature to express itself in the tragic, rather than the comic: “Two and a half thousand years ago, at the time of Aristophanes, the Greeks believed that comedy was superior to tragedy: tragedy was the merely [...]

The other day I was walking along our high street when I saw this ‘mobile CCTV’… tank parked up. They were snapping, so I thought it only polite to reciprocate. It seems we’ve totally resigned ourselves to being discreetly observed at all times. Speed cameras, CCTV, Congestion Charge cameras… I the novel I’ve been working [...]

How prescient of me. Or not. Falwell is now the most dangerous guy in heaven. Or somewhere. I feel bad. Only this evening I was chatting with my mum about the BBC report in the last post, and quipped I wished he was dead. Oops. Sorry. Technorati: Dead | Falwell

Interesting report [ here ] from BBC’s 10 o’clock news. Navigate to the report from the link. Both sides using the same text to come to opposite conclusions. Jerry Falwell is the most dangerous man on earth. Technorati: BBC | Environment | Evangelical | Falwell

It’s actually rather nice. Technorati: Big Brother | Alpha