Kester Brewin

I’ve been reflecting a bit on the conversation about the ‘Year of Opposition’, and the comments in particular that dealt with gender imbalance. What has really struck me about the above conversation is that all the voices are male. And I wonder whether the language of “thrashing things out” and the imagery of the boxing [...]

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the 10 year anniversary of 9/11, and in the last few days how it might relate to the discussion of whether ‘newness’ is possible. This isn’t meant as an holistic critique or discussion of the events all those years ago, instead I’ve been drawn to thinking about the [...]

The reading I’ve been doing on piracy throws up an interesting question: where are the women? The literature and the culture around piracy is very very male, so did women have a place at all? The answer is that they did, although it is not clear the extent to which women did turn pirate. The [...]

The work on piracy continues apace. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is the pirate emblem ‘The Jolly Roger.’ This skull and crossed bones, or swords, was hoisted by pirates as they approached vessels they were about to attack, as a sort of early warning / threat system. Crews who had turned mutinously [...]

I’ve been away for a couple of days, so haven’t posted again on the aftermath of the night of looting that gripped various locations in London, and then spread to other cities in the UK. But in the mean time I’ve faced some criticism for my previous post for a) appearing to back away from [...]

  It’s perhaps too soon to work out what the hell really happened in London last night, or why. I stayed up til 2am following the news and the Twitter feeds, and I have to say it was one of the saddest nights I’ve ever spent in the capital. There has already been some debate [...]

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 [...]

Was invited to debate with Steve Chalke last night on the topic of ‘the Politics of Pentecost’ – which was designed to think about issues of multiculturalism and inclusion over the Pentecost festival. Steve gave a very interesting opening talk about this, which we then argued over afterwards, drawing in questions from the floor too. [...]

Tricky ground here, so I hope you’ll bear with me. I’ve never wanted to shy away from what I feel needs thinking about, and I feel that a few stories have come together recently that warrant some comment. Firstly, the ‘Slut Walks’ began after uproar broke out following a Canadian policeman’s advice to a personal [...]

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 [...]