Kester Brewin

Thanks to Helen of Urban Practitioners for sending me this article in The Guardian a couple of weeks back about Jaime Lerner and his radical environmental policies that have transformed the Brazilian city of Curitiba. I say environmental in the truest sense: he is an architect by trade, and is concerned with the built environment, [...]

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 [...]

It’s been a difficult few weeks: ‘What are you reading?’ ‘A book about open-water swimming.’ ‘Errr….’ Actually a far more subtle and interesting book than one might think, Waterlog is a homage to John Cheever’s classic short story ‘The Swimmer’, in which the hero decides to swim the 8 miles home from a party using [...]

Last April, in the build-up to Easter, I posted a series of thoughts about Jesus and Paul’s journeys toward Jerusalem, and the very different attitudes they took when arrested there. I argued that in Paul’s ‘strategising’ to get himself to Rome, we see the conception of power-Christianity, which perhaps came to full birth with the [...]

“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 [...]

Not the most romantic of movies, but we went to see There Will Be Blood last night. It’s a terrific movie. If you haven’t yet seen it, do. No matter how big your plasma screen, you’ll need to see this one on the big screen. Oil, Crude and Spiritual, are the two things two men [...]

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 [...]

On the train to this little drinks thing for an education weekly I write some stuff for, just a couple of stops. Three guys sitting in seats across the aisle: “So, we go from the pub to the match, and then from there onto another pub, and I’m so wasted by now, and then we [...]

Andrew Jones posted yesterday about the imminent release of the first film of the Philip Pullman trilogy ‘His Dark Materials’. (Why the hell has is been re-named? Durrr…. ) In the post he leans to siding with Matt Barber, who has written that Pullman’s anti-theist stance is a strong theme, and thus Christians should avoid [...]

Just back from a wonderful weekend in the depths of Wales. I didn’t find RS Thomas, or any great rural epiphany, but, in keeping with the joys of weekends in other people’s houses, had a great time dipping into some books. The most enjoyable was Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics*. It’s an eccentric volume itself, but [...]