Kester Brewin

Tweeted about this piece earlier today, but wanted to flag up and reflect further on Henry Marsh’s piece in Granta, detailing his neurosurgical work operating on a tumour in a pineal gland. The pineal gland is buried deep within the brain, and is thus only reached after a perilous journey through the physical matter that [...]

  One of the things I liked about Tom Wolfe’s novel I Am Charlotte Simmons is the journey that one of the main characters, Jojo, takes, from ‘dumb college jock’ to athletic student of philosophy. It’s an arc that’s not that uncommon: the pursuit of excellence in sport requires careful reflection on the self; top [...]

‘I looked and looked but I didn’t see God.’ – Yuri Gagarin ‘That transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a [...]

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 [...]

Through a good friend Barry Taylor I started reading some stuff on Simon Critchley, and was struck by this interview over at Full Stop, in which he talks about the roots of philosophy: Philosophy begins with a death, but it doesn’t just begin with a death — it begins with a political execution. He is [...]

The time for Mutiny has finally come! I was going to wait until everything had worked itself through various systems and things were sorted on Amazon and iBookstore etc, but in the end I thought sod it – just let the thing run free now… especially as Lulu are offering a really nice site-wide discount [...]

Interesting article on Ceasefire looking at Zizek and de Botton, which includes this great quote from Kafka: “Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? [...]

I’ve been reading Brian Christian’s excellent book The Most Human Human over the past week or so – inspired by the very good Radiolab on ‘Talking to Machines.’ One thought from it that’s made me think a lot is the concept of the Japanese word mu. It comes in a section where Christian is describing [...]

Ended up going to see Orbital last night – some nice throwback tunes in the rather odd, but acoustically brilliant Royal Albert Hall. The gig was good, but as is normal with this sort of ‘live’ electronic stuff, there’s not a lot to look at musically, and with the beats going around my mind starting [...]

I’ve not yet read the full book that Alain de Botton has been promoting recently, but I’ve read a number of interviews and heard him speak, and browsed his website: religionforatheists.com and I wanted to post a couple of first-thoughts about his thesis. Firstly, he’s being unashamed to say that he is ‘picking and mixing’ [...]