Kester Brewin

Happy new year? Well, only if you’re from the Middle Ages, when the traditional time to celebrate new year was from around 25th March for a week. It’s thought that this might be the background to April Fool’s Day: when ‘modern’ types started celebrating new year according to the Julian calendar, they made fun of [...]

I’ve just finished reading Rob Bell’s book Love Wins – and will be reviewing it for Third Way magazine (ie, buy that too, it’s not this post, I promise). It’s a really great book; I highly recommend it. It’s very very readable – which, for some, may be read as a euphemism for ‘dumbed down’ [...]

On Saturday evening the moon was the fullest and closest it has been for twenty years. We got lucky in London – the sky was perfectly clear and the colours were quite incredible. Someone got a fabulous shot at Glastonbury Tor too, which has been doing the rounds. I have a hunch that the moon [...]

I’ve just been reading a post by Frank Viola over on his blog, where he’s put up an interview with Paul Copan, author of ‘Is God a Moral Monster.‘ Part of it really made me sit up and think: Question: Deuteronomy 23:1 says, “No one whose testicles are crushed or whose male organ is cut [...]

Very good episode of In Our Time this week, which looked at free will. 50 mins or so – and very well worthwhile listening to, especially in the context of the debate on heaven and hell which is still rumbling around the publication of Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins. There are serious problems on [...]

Amazon now allow anyone to publish to their store using ‘Kindle Direct Publishing‘ so I’ve uploaded a short story called ‘Into Great Science’ which I wrote last year. “Fumbling, floating, he found the hammer, and headed for the window…” In lean times NASA has gone into partnership with the Catholic Church, launching a ‘Voyager’-style probe [...]

Thanks to KV for putting me on to a book that has been quietly notching up huge sales in the US. ‘Heaven is for Real‘ is the true story of a 4 year old boy, who ‘died’ and went to heaven, and then came back: Just two months shy of his fourth birthday, Colton Burpo, [...]

Nice bit of banter going on between Tony Jones and Pete Rollins, where Tony challenged Pete to ‘give up atheism for Lent’. Outlining what this might look like, he requests: I’d like Pete to post some beautiful, flowery prayers on his blog. I’d like Pete to make some conclusive claims about the characteristics of God. [...]

WordPress is fantastic, but a lot of people are using Facebook now as their portal into the rest of the web, so I thought I’d share some stuff for other bloggers I’d found on integrating the two, with Twitter too. I’ve recently come across the WordPress plug-in WPBook. I think it’s great, and if you [...]

The debate around hell and damnation continues apace. Rob Bell is about to launch Love Wins, and the arguments about whether he is apostate or a Universalist or worse (filth, as one commenter puts it, an egotistical heretic as another says) are making one thing for certain: His Publisher Wins. But one question keeps coming [...]