Kester Brewin

“I’d rather be arrested for shoplifting than ever be an evangelical leader again. There was a certain basic and decent honesty about stealing pork chops that selling God had lacked.“ It’s only March, I know, but I’ll put a punt on Crazy for God still being one of my top 5 books of 2008 in [...]

So the Oscars have been wept along to, and we’ve had the BAFTAs and the BRITs and the Grammys… I think people are missing a trick here. Come on Emergent, give us an award ceremony! We demand a tacky hotel and venue, with numbered tables, free alcohol and cut away shots to Andrew Jones as [...]

Not the most romantic of movies, but we went to see There Will Be Blood last night. It’s a terrific movie. If you haven’t yet seen it, do. No matter how big your plasma screen, you’ll need to see this one on the big screen. Oil, Crude and Spiritual, are the two things two men [...]

I just watched the Liverpool Nativity on BBC3 tonight, and it was quite brilliant. This was no cynical re-telling, but a contemporary, serious, politically aware take on the Christmas narrative, writ large as public spectacle. Thousands and thousands had turned out to the Dockside to join the spectacle, performed live throughout the city. What is [...]

The usually so-antagonistic-its-almost-funny Time Out seem to have mellowed this year. They gave Greenbelt a great write-up as the ‘best family festival’ and this week have an actually really good series of pieces on religious London: Muslim speed-dating, living in a London monastery, Kensington Temple and a trip behind the scenes at the stunning Shri [...]

Andrew Jones posted yesterday about the imminent release of the first film of the Philip Pullman trilogy ‘His Dark Materials’. (Why the hell has is been re-named? Durrr…. ) In the post he leans to siding with Matt Barber, who has written that Pullman’s anti-theist stance is a strong theme, and thus Christians should avoid [...]

A strange and beautiful weekend. We were down in Bristol, seeing some good friends. In one of those marvellous moments, I found myself taking the complimentary tickets of a multi-Oscar-winning animator to see the World Premier of the new score to the 1920′s classic He Who Gets Slapped. Will Gregory, of Goldfrapp fame, had written [...]

Perhaps my favourite living artist – so glad he’s won the Turner Prize.

A quite brilliant piece of TV on BBC 4 tonight. Worth the license fee on its own, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives traced the journey of Eels front-man Mark Everett uncovering the life of his father, the eminent physicist Hugh Everett III. Everett Snr, in a radical challenge to the Quantum Mechanical orthodoxy of the day, [...]

Just back from a wonderful weekend in the depths of Wales. I didn’t find RS Thomas, or any great rural epiphany, but, in keeping with the joys of weekends in other people’s houses, had a great time dipping into some books. The most enjoyable was Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics*. It’s an eccentric volume itself, but [...]