Kester Brewin

I fell into conversation yesterday with a friend of a friend, who began by asking me what church I went to, which precipitated a long debate about, among other things, full-time Christian work.
I’ve done it, and I was left with this impression: being a Christian whilst working for a church is like doing the long [...]

I’ve been reading Richard Sennett’s excellent book The Craftsman – which I highly recommend to anyone interested in ideas of technology, creativity (a word he hates, for good reason) and work. It is not a book about woodwork or William Morris. Rather, he takes a broad look at what it means to work in an engaged [...]

One of the nice things I’m involved in is helping put together the Greenbelt talks programme, which means I’m always on the look out for good thinkers with good things to say.
Last year I came across an organisation called The School of Life, which aims to help people engage in practical philosophy and playful thinking [...]

Despite Nick Griffin making an ass of himself on television last week, fascist and extremist parties never talk complete nonsense. There is always a dangerous fraction of truth within their rhetoric – a miniscule grain upon which they then build racist and mindless policies.
Unless serious politicians are willing to admit these small fractions of truth, [...]

[ Laws and Packaging 1 ] [ Laws and Packaging 2 ]
I the previous two posts I’ve been trying to set out something of what it feels like being a stranger in the US. The stranger is at the boundary – neither fully in nor fully out – and can thus help those who are [...]

[ Laws and Packaging 1 ]
I am a stranger in the US. But, as Georg Simmell says, perhaps strangers can offer insights that natives can’t see. Not that these things aren’t also problems in the UK. But that’s for some other stranger to point out.
The first thing that’s hit me each time I’ve come here [...]

I’ve been in New York a few days now, and part of me feels it’s too short a time to make any sense of what I’m seeing, too soon to have any valid critique. But then I read Georg Simmell, who notes that the stranger in our midst is important because they ‘hold up a [...]

It’s pretty much a year to the day since I began writing my new book, and I now that the contracts are all exchanged I thought it was time to pop the lid off and start getting the word out there.
Don’t go rushing to Amazon just yet – it’ll be on shelves in July next [...]

Excellent time at Apple2 last night. Alistair Duncan from The Garden kick-started proceedings with an introduction to Heidegger’s philosophical framework, and how this impacted his thinking on technology later on in his life after the scandals surrounding Nazism had died down a little.
Though his later language is more poetry than hard logic, Heidegger is trying [...]

I’ve been intrigued by the launch video for GoogleWave that is going round at the moment. It’s an impressive geek-fest, for one one thing. And the product does seem pretty impressive too. The phrase that has particularly caught my attention though is ‘Googlewave is what email would be if we were inventing it now.’ And [...]