Kester Brewin

Imaginary The impossibility of finding the root of all that is negative in me; the move into a new plane only a symbolic trick that extends us all into the realm of the imaginary; a mathematical slight of hand: you invented complexity, smiled wryly as you wrote it and called it i.

I’ve said it many times here before, but if you haven’t already tuned in to Radio 4′s ‘In Our Time‘ archive on your iTunes, then you’re seriously missing out. Listening to it I’m always reminded of the great quote in Good Will Hunting where Will quips to a Harvard student: you wasted $150,000 on an [...]

Been really enjoying Brian McLaren’s new book A New Kind of Christianity. In the concluding chapter he outlines what this new sort of Christianity might look like, and in one section suggests at a denominational level that churches ‘develop a theology of institutions.’ What he says is interesting in the light of the short series [...]

For the first time in years I actually wish I was at Glastonbury, rather than just watching the muddy mayhem on TV. The festival space is hugely important, a carnival intervention into the everyday where new inversions of dress, cuisine and social space are celebrated. The BBC’s coverage is excellent as ever, but I had [...]

I’ve been asked to contribute to what might be best described as a theological dictionary of culture – coming out sometime at the end of the year I think – and one of the entries I’ve take on is football, through the lens of perhaps its greatest player, Pele. Nice to be able to pass of [...]

Emerging/Retreating [1] | Emerging/Retreating [2] | Emerging/Retreating [3] In the comments on the previous post Acetate Monkey asked ‘How did Vaux wind up?’ Resisting the temptation to explain all the ways that Vaux wound people up, I thought I’d post the section of the book that deals a little with that… with another encouragement to [...]

Emerging/Retreating [1] | Emerging/Retreating [2] I’m glad Jonny has posted some of his thoughts and responses to these posts on his site, and Andrew Jones has some great thoughts too, backed up by a range of pieces he’s written around the issues here too. As I set out in a long comment on Jonny’s blog, [...]

Emerging/Retreating [1] I’m quite surprised at the traffic caused by the last post – been the most read thing I’ve posted for a while, and that seems to suggest that the theme has resonated, though not all in agreement. I had a good chat to Jonny on the phone yesterday, who said he initially thought [...]

I’ve been thinking over the previous post, and over the conversation I had with Barry Taylor on Saturday about the state of things, and a thought keeps returning to me: there seems to have been a retreat to the institutions recently. I want to be very careful here, partly because a) I have many friends [...]

Had a fine morning yesterday with Barry Taylor at the Tate Britain. We went round the very wonderful Rude Britannia exhibition, which is a lot deeper and richer than saucy postcards, though there are plenty like this one above to tickle your fancy. Different rooms of exhibition have been co-curated by the likes of Harry Hill, Steve Bell [...]