Kester Brewin

Bethlehem has some great hotels. The Intercontinental is a fantastic old place, fronted with beautiful stones and containing a bar and pool room in a cavernous, lime basement. When I stayed there last year it was living up to its name: people from all continents gathered at meal times, piling plates from the buffet with [...]

Caesarean Sections
The bitter old man stands
at the gates of the earth
waiting, watching,
guarding the only entrance
and exit to this citadel planet.
The babies file in
and the dead file out
and he watches them,
grimly keeping count.
He watches, he waits
he shivers to shake
tired cold from old limbs,
for he must stay awake
for the one they say
will attempt a salvation.
One eye is [...]

The first window on the calendar opens. The scene begins…

As I wrote in the previous post, one of the fascinating things about the Incarnation is that it stands as an actual interruption, a marked moment of time with a before and after. Nothing was the same before, and nothing will be the same again.
It’s been [...]

Just to say that I’ve decided to blog a series of ‘Advent[ures] In Incarnation’ throughout December, looking askance at this most profound time of year with some thoughts, poems, links… and whatever else takes my fancy.
Probably be posts every couple of days, so look out for them, spread the word etc. Looking forward to it.

Empathy [1] |  Empathy [2]
In the previous two posts I’ve been trying to get to grips with the roots of empathy with the other, and the location of our fears of engaging the other. I’ve radically summarised Levinas and Zizek by saying that the former would locate our fears in the enigma of the other, [...]

I’m interested in this short series in trying to reflect on the best ground for our attempts to empathise with ‘the other.’ In the first post I ended by suggesting that it would be fruitful to consider where our fears of engaging the other lie. So here we go:
It seems to me that Levinas would [...]

New Physics [1] |  New Physics [2]
In the previous two posts I’ve been trying to explore some of the implications that the ‘new physics’ might have on our theology. It is worth emphasising that I strongly believe that the new physics must have an impact on our theology. If it, or indeed any new scientific [...]