Kester Brewin

One of the things I try to do on this site is draw together different strands of things that I come across. One strand… interesting… 2 or 3 covering the same issue in different ways… suggests there’s something deeper to look at. Towards the end of last week, Tony Jones posted what might have been [...]

Religion as Illusion [ 1 ] In yesterday’s post I suggested that one of the problems within Christianity is that people believe too much. What people tend to do is suspend their rational belief in the natural, physical world for a few hours and enter into a place where they apparently believe in the supernatural [...]

Religion as Illusion [2] Pete Rollins posted something on ethics over on his blog yesterday, in which he made argued that churches should not be ‘teaching’ ethics, and nor should people be trying ‘hold’ ethical principles: So what is the alternative to attempting to hold ethical principles? The answer is creating a space of grace [...]

You go to a shop to buy a bat, and a ball. In total they cost £1.10. The bat costs £1 more than the ball. How much does the bat cost? Listened to a very interesting episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast on ‘the enigma of reason’ yesterday. The interviewee – Dan Sperber – was [...]

Been quiet here with end of term busyness and stuff, but as we come to the first Sunday in… well, around 150 years, where there’s not been a News of the World to buy, I wanted to offer some reflections on the phone-hacking scandal. It’s pretty much dominated the UK news for weeks now, and [...]

  I went to see Michelangelo Frammartino’s new film last night, Le Quattro Volte. This is a very difficult film to do justice to on the page, but I will simply say: try to go and see it. Do all you can to get to see it at the cinema. This is cinema. Not plasma TV [...]

Tombs For Gods Who Once Spoke Temples, churches, mosques, you great piles of stones gathered against entropy, the fruits of hard labour, gathering moss in the rain and reaching, always reaching high to poke the underbelly of heaven. In all my travels, in all the steps I’ve climbed and candle-lit interiors, heavy with incense and [...]

April is the cruelest month… Easter always coincides with the culmination of the football season in Europe, and a number of things have been leading me to think about the nature of sports and games and their connection to aggression and violence. Enlightened religion is very big on peace and harmony, but I’ve begun to question [...]

Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ is back in the news again after Christian fundamentalists took a hammer to a print of it in a gallery in France. If you’ve never seen the photograph ‘up close’ then I’d highly recommend it. It’s far more beautiful than the title suggests, and a subtle piece of trickster-work. It is [...]

I’m reading Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare at the moment. It’s a brilliant book, grounding the often mythic character of the bard into his real world of Elizabethan London. I’d highly recommend it. One quote that jumped out at me the other day in within a discussion of Anthony and [...]