Kester Brewin

Bethlehem has some great hotels. The Intercontinental is a fantastic old place, fronted with beautiful stones and containing a bar and pool room in a cavernous, lime basement. When I stayed there last year it was living up to its name: people from all continents gathered at meal times, piling plates from the buffet with [...]

Whenever we engage ‘the other’ we have to overcome our fear of doing so. Engagement that holds no such fear is not engagement with an ‘other’; it is easy to love what is lovely – we are called to overcome our fear and love that which is not. As we consider the grounds of the [...]

The first window on the calendar opens. The scene begins… As I wrote in the previous post, one of the fascinating things about the Incarnation is that it stands as an actual interruption, a marked moment of time with a before and after. Nothing was the same before, and nothing will be the same again. [...]

So the season of Advent comes around again. The waiting, the cold bite of the wind, the familiar carols reheated. Hopes and fears. It’s my favourite time of year, I think, partly because the event of the Incarnation is still just so impregnated with mystery and rich with metaphor. So I’ve decided to write a series [...]

[ 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 [...]

[ 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 [...]

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 [...]

One of the things I like about the web is that one can drop a pebble into it… and the ripples appear elsewhere. For those (few, I know) who may have followed here but not elsewhere, there has been quite a lot of reaction to the posts on piracy, mostly ignited by Richard Sudworth’s repost [...]

[ Piracy 1 ] | [ Piracy 2 ] | [ Piracy 3 ] | [ Piracy 4 ] | [ Piracy 5 ] [ Piracy 6 ] We began this series with a question – why is it that we are happy to allow our children to go to pirate parties, and involve themselves [...]

[ Piracy 1 ] | [ Piracy 2 ] | [ Piracy 3 ] | [ Piracy 4 ] | [ Piracy 5 ] What pirates do, as a rule, is emerge from the underbelly of a ‘stuck’ orthodoxy and, by way of actions that are initially perceived as heretical, reinvigorate that practice. The heresy [...]