Kester Brewin

London goes to the polls this week. While the rest of the country has local council elections, London votes for its Mayor. It’s the biggest directly-elected budget-holding post in the UK: £13 billion annually to spend, employing 103,000 people and a £39billion transport investment programme over the next 10 years.. And there are some massively [...]

There are lots of reasons why you really should go and buy Tom Sine’s new book ‘The New Conspirators‘, and none of them are that it’s got a quote from me telling you to on the back. One of them would be that I think it’s the best looking Christian book I’ve seen for ages. [...]

"One of the things that makes Mrs Clinton so psychologically fascinating is her tendency to portray everthing in terms of conflict and confrontation. And one of the characteristics that makes her so interesting politically is that she is a much better candidate when things are going badly than when they are going well." From BBC [...]

Or, perhaps more accurately, a post about liberty. An article I read over the weekend was arguing that the Church has let people down by shying away from theologies of sex. So I thought I’d dip my toe in… Good to hear Peter Tatchell on the radio this morning, talking about the protests over the [...]

Oh dear. The inevitable has happened: someone’s come up with a way for us to use our mobiles when on the plane. “I’M ON THE PLANE” Next up: ‘mobile free areas’ on planes, and stickers telling people to keep their voices down. I think it’s sad, to be honest. Planes were one of those places [...]

Kings College have a new MA which they wondered if I’d be happy to flag up, which I am. It’s in ‘Politics, Theology and Faith-Based Organisations’, and you can read more about it in the doc attached below.

A recent government report has proposed that teenagers should make an oath of allegiance to ‘Queen and Country’, in order to give them a ‘sense of belonging.’ I’m aware that something similar exists in the US education system, though the only reason I’m aware of it is by it’s bitter-sweet use in movies to suggest [...]

It’s been a huge day of sport in the UK. Depressingly the team I support got dumped out of a cup competition, and England were also beaten in a big rugby international by Scotland. But later on, Jonny’s team – who’ve had literally hundreds of millions of pounds spent on players since being bought by [...]

“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 [...]

Friday 29th February. Another leap year, another ‘correction’ in our faulty estimate of 365 days in a year. We thought perhaps the Universe should have given us tidy integers, orbits that ran to exact days, but the closer we looked, the further away our measures got. The 4-yearly leap day is an attempt to get [...]