Kester Brewin

The blanks for the After Magic hardbacks to be hand-inked arrived today, and I’ve got to say I’m really excited about them. They’ve come out really really well… Will be doing the printing onto the covers this weekend and begin sending them out on Monday all being well. There’s a small number still available for [...]

Pancake Day falls this coming Tuesday in the UK… thought I’d post a few thoughts about its origins, and how we might use them to think beyond…well, munching loads of pancakes. Like so many traditions over here, Pancake Day has some origins in the Christian calendar… Shrove Tuesday, as it has historically been known, is [...]

Interesting to note that, even after all these years, Andreas Serrano’s work, the ‘Piss Christ’ is still causing controversy over in the US as the election approaches. (Thanks, Barry, for the link) Many years ago, when I focused more on theology, I wrote The Complex Christ (Signs of Emergence in the US) which had a [...]

Quick thought around Easter…which is, when one thinks about it, a pretty bizarre religious festival, unfolding a complex, gruesome, politically charged and then miraculous narrative. For some time my friend Pete Rollins has focused quite a lot of his theological thinking around Jesus’ cry from the cross about being forsaken. “My god, my god, why [...]

  “We fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that’s the end.” Hamlet, Act IV, Scene III In the previous post I tried to set out a distinction between death (which can remain beautiful – a frozen moment just beyond life) [...]

I’ve resisted commenting too quickly on the tragedy that’s unfolded in Norway. I think sometimes we need to hold back from immediately pushing views into a space that should simply be reserved for grief and self-examination. But as the nation of Norway itself begins to process what’s happened, I wanted to offer a couple of [...]

Interesting piece in The Independent yesterday, asking why people bother going to festivals when the sound quality is crap, there’s mud everywhere, you can’t sleep, and people push and spill beer all over you. I visited Glastonbury once, many years ago now, and left utterly mystified. Why, I wondered at the time, did so many [...]

  I went to see Michelangelo Frammartino’s new film last night, Le Quattro Volte. This is a very difficult film to do justice to on the page, but I will simply say: try to go and see it. Do all you can to get to see it at the cinema. This is cinema. Not plasma TV [...]

Jeremy Rifkin’s talk about empathy leads us to some interesting conclusions about heaven. Because empathy is about engaging with those who are other, and experiencing some of their pain, heaven – as traditionally seen – must be a place where there is no empathy, because pain cannot be experienced. The typically Christian view of heaven [...]

The story of the Chilean miners has been one of the most incredibly moving events I can remember. There’s something of the two-fingers-up-to-nature which is both exhilarating and troubling, and something of the deeply archetypal and transformative about the rescue… 33 Sliding, encased, through the bowels the earth thirty-three steel turds are evacuated into the [...]