Kester Brewin

A free supplement in The Independent today is all about spread betting: what it is, what the pitfalls are. It was pretty clear: there are potentially huge rewards, but because you can bet whatever money you like on each share, you can actually be exposed to huge losses too. Fine, whatever. But what disgusted me [...]

Another extraordinary snippet from the WSJ interview with Eric Schmidt concerns the future of what Google wants to be able to do: “We’re trying to figure out what the future of search is… We’re still happy to be in search, believe me. But… I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions, [...]

Extraordinary story on the BBC site today. An armed robber who raided a mobile phone shop in Florida was talked down from his robbery by a shop assistant who ‘spoke to him about Jesus.’ The man said he was a Christian and was “embarrassed” to be doing what he was doing but that he needed [...]

Jonny has posted a very comprehensive review of ‘Other’ on his blog, which is well worth a read. He admits that he found it tricky to get right given the back-and-forth we’ve had recently over the issue of institutions, but I think he’s done a good job. It seems that the book is causing quite [...]

HT to Barry for putting me on to this animation of a short talk by Marx-expert David Harvey. Brilliant.

Was kindly invited by my publishers to have dinner with Dallas Willard last night with a few others. Dallas has a new book out called Personal Religion, Public Reality?: Towards a Knowledge of Faith which he talked a little about, leading to a very interesting roundtable discussion about what exactly knowledge was or could be. [...]

Thanks for the comments on the post about happiness the other day. I’ve been mulling over the idea of happiness, and why we are perhaps the most unhappy society ever, and linking it to a new direction my thinking seems to be being drawn in. As I’ve written before, I’m really interested in the charred [...]

Last year was about writing the book, due out in June. There’ll be more of that here in good time. But I think it’s clearer now what this year’s focus could be. From some of the embers of Vaux a few of us began Apple, a series of conversations around ideas of technology and theology. [...]

There is a lot of debate in the news at the moment about what should be done with the wbankers. Should there be a ‘maximum wage’? Should they be allowed to earn obscene bonuses even though their banks have virtually collapsed? Should we all be held to ransom with the argument that they will go [...]

[ Piracy 1 ] In the previous post I set out the tension between the godly meditations that St Paul urged us to – whatever is good, and pure etc. – and the raucously popular stories about pirates that outsold everything else in a bookshop around St Paul’s Cathedral. In Captain Johnson’s A General History [...]