Kester Brewin

As the Archbishop heads for Synod this afternoon to defend himself and, according to some exaggerated reports, save his job, I’ve been mulling over exactly why he has been under such pressure for his comments on Sharia Law. Even the shallowest examination of him as a man would reveal a hugely intelligent thinker and a [...]

Archbishop Rowan is getting huge amounts of flack for his comments on a selective use of some parts of Sharia law in certain communities in the UK. Typically, his arguments, based on some serious reading, have been caricatured and turned into shock headlines. Which suggests he was perhaps ill-advised – this sort of reaction was [...]

There’s a simple rule to follow if you want to make an ad about a car: make it total fantastical. Don’t mention traffic jams. Don’t mention the boredom of driving along motorways, the taxes and the emissions, the noise or anything else. Instead, make the car like a robot, or a dog. Make it jump [...]

Sorry been a bit quiet here. Kids’ birthdays, other writing projects… stuff. Anyway, a piece on the news caught my ear yesterday. Apparently a long-term study of the hunting habits of peregrine falcons has found that they have evolved their methods and are now increasingly hunting in cities at night. The thinking is that they [...]

The last couple of days have seen local government proposals to close hundreds of small village schools in the England, and central government proposals to build Titan ‘super-prisons’ in England and Wales. Both policies seem in doubt now, as central government has written to local governments reminding them of their obligations to keep small schools [...]

Power Religion [1] | Power Religion [2] | Power Religion [3] | Power Religion [4] So, how might we try to gather some of this together into a ritual, a performance, a remembering worthy of the rich tapestry of signs it suggests? I think, firstly, we have to humbly accept that we simply never will [...]

Power Religion [1] You might be wondering what the hell the last post was about, and where I’m going with this. Join the club. In the previous post, I outlined Diamond’s basic thesis in Guns, Germs and Steel, and retold the story of Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca Emperor Atahuallpa. But what is the significance? [...]

It’s been out for about a decade now, but I finally got round to reading Jared Diamonds’ book Guns, Germs and Steel. I think it’s excellent. The basic thesis, for those who haven’t read it, is that humanity, having developed out of the same group of lucky apes a long time back, has obviously developed [...]

In my recent post about predictions for 2008, I was (not) surprised to find most of the debate being around the comment of the collapse of the Emerging project. Actually, I think it’ll be more about the language changing, but hey. What garnered no comment was the prediction about ’08 being the year when people [...]

…action on climate change; governments will admit it will hurt …reaction against privacy breaches: overuse of CCTV / government data-loss …reaction against the classical liberal agenda: immigration caps / multiculturalism as a worthy but more-difficult-than-we-thought project / communitarianism …serious criticism of democracy as a way of getting things done …the collapse of the emerging church [...]