Kester Brewin

Tad Delay has written a great couple of punchy paragraphs thinking about Boston, radicalised youth and the problem of religion within empires. What town in America goes a single year without producing young men who – amidst the college-aged angst of life directions, relationships, or career fears – turn to religious fundamentalism and/or militant violence? [...]

I spoke at the SCM national gathering in York last weekend, and drew some thoughts together from my book Other about the apparently universal importance of a period of interruption in the transition from adolescence to full adulthood. This interruption is generally accompanied by a period of removal or withdrawal from the host community. We [...]

Listening to the radio this morning I was struck by the odd similarity between three of the major news items. Firstly, ubiquitously, there’s the economic crisis – which more and more seems to boil down to the fact that people – that’s you, me and them – got greedy. With the boss of Barclays now [...]

One of the key questions that has been often asked about the ‘Occupy’ protests is ‘what are your proposed alternatives?’ This, I think, is often asked with a background attitude of ‘I really don’t think you have any alternatives, do you?’ The implication being, before you moan about how bad things are, make sure you [...]

Rather than remain online, I thought I’d flyer-up some of the ideas I’ve been working on and hand them out at the Occupy demo in London today, camped at St Paul’s. You can download the PDF here: Mutiny Or just read the text… In May 1724, in a small bookshop just a stone’s throw from [...]

The media coverage in the UK has been limited, but I think the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest is interesting, and I hope it turns out to be significant. There was comment on BBC radio the other morning suggesting variously that it was the Democratic equivalent of the Republican ‘Tea Party’ movement  - though I’m not [...]

Not had much time to post – flat out at work preparing for a school inspection, and reading and writing when I can too. All of which ironically brings me to post about the very idea of work… It starts with rather a good story, which I hope you’ll bear with before I try to [...]

I ended up on the 7th floor of a multi-story car park in Peckham this evening, at an event hosted by Bold Tendencies, which looked at the car parks from an architectural and anthropological point of view. One contributor made the point that the problem of car parking only became such as Henry Ford developed [...]

Thought it would be good to catch people up a little on what I’ve been working on the last couple of weeks. As you’ll know if you’ve read here for any time, one of my areas of interest is around pirates and piracy. I posted a series entitled ‘A Plea for Christian Piracy’ some time [...]

I’m currently consulting on a BBC programme to be broadcast in the autumn which is all about the mathematics of everyday life. Not allowed to say any more about it, but there is a section there about how Google can inform hospitals of impending flu epidemics days before they actually hit by tracking the search [...]