Kester Brewin

Other Other [1] |  Other Other [2] In the previous two posts I’ve been trying to tease out some of the issues being engaging ‘the other’ – especially the problem of there being ‘other others’ who we may not have considered when we act. One response to the exponentially expanding series of others is to [...]

As the snow continues to fall, a continuation of the extract from ‘Other‘: Christmas had long passed when the snow fell, but those few February days were picture-postcard scenes of winter and as we trudged through snowy woods near the house I was reminded of the carol: Good King Wenceslas looked out On the feast [...]

With the current snowy and icy conditions in the UK I thought I’d post an extract from ‘Other’ which links the huge snowfalls we’ve had in the past couple of winters to the idea of TAZ which is one of the central themes of ‘Other‘ – a welcome addition to anyone’s Christmas present pile, heartily [...]

I’ve been reading The Shallows – How the Internet is Changing How We Think, Read and Remember and led a discussion about the effects of digital culture on our brains for our 6th Form yesterday. It was actually a very interest debate, which took in the printing press, Shakespeare, violence, gaming and, most importantly, speed [...]

Been really enjoying Brian McLaren’s new book A New Kind of Christianity. In the concluding chapter he outlines what this new sort of Christianity might look like, and in one section suggests at a denominational level that churches ‘develop a theology of institutions.’ What he says is interesting in the light of the short series [...]

[ Mash Up 1 ] [ Mash Up 2 ] In the previous two posts I’ve been trying to explore what our relationship is to text, especially when the text we are reading is ‘too comfortable’. David Shields has been trying to shock people into re-thinking what next for literature in his manifesto, Reality Hunger, [...]

[ Mash Up 2 ] [ Mash Up 3 ] In case you missed it, there has been something of a storm raging in some parts of the world of letters over David Shields’ new book: Reality Hunger. Why? Because in this brave manifesto, he takes on the future of literature by means of ‘some [...]

A rare interview in today’s Guardian with the author of Gilead, Housekeeping and now Home, includes this lovely quote regarding Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens: “[Dawkins] acts as if the physical world that is manifest to us describes reality exhaustively. I’m not impressed with the quality of [his] writing, or of Christopher Hitchens’ writing. If [...]

Still working my way through The Monstrosity of Christ, a dual between Zizek (Marxist-Atheist) and Milbank (Radical Orthodox) in which the atheist rather brilliantly claims to be a far better Christian that the orthodox theologian. One passage I’ve been very struck by in Zizek’s opening salvo as he discusses religion in general: Christianity is the [...]

“A capitalist system that privatizes profits in good times and socializes losses in bad times needs some fixes.“ Milton Friedman “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.“ Epictetus