As we come round to 10 years since 9/11 I wanted to do a quick plug of Other, for the simple reason that it meets head on the challenges of living in a world where difference so desperately needs to be understood.

Whether it’s personal issues of depression or the alienating effects of technology, or local issues of teenage gangs or noisy neighbours, or racism, sexism, questions about multiculturalism – right the way through to political wars, religious fundamentalism and international terrorism – the problem of dealing with the ‘other’ that is right at the heart.

How can Republicans understand Democrats, Evangelicals understand Liberals, Christians understand Muslims, local people understand asylum seekers and immigrants? Technology has brought the whole world closer to us, but that has often only increased the stress and anxiety of having to deal with those who are very different to us. When asked to summarise the entire body of the Jewish Law, Jesus didn’t come out with a list of ‘thou shalt nots,’ but instead told us very simply to love. Love God, love our neighbours, just as we love ourselves.

We seem to be struggling with all three, and the tragedy of 9/11 brings all of those struggles into focus: a tragic misunderstanding of what God wants, a terrible hatred for those from a different culture, and a deep insecurity that must have led those young men to seek affirmation in such horrific ways.

How can we possibly respond, and love the other better? Well, drawing on everything from poets to pirates, that’s what the book is all about. As one reviewer put it on Amazon: ‘I’ve rarely read any “Christian” book that draws on such a wide body of knowledge. It’s the book’s freedom from the usual self-referential fare that so many “Christian” authors recycle that makes it so interesting, fresh and provocative.’

I really do believe in it as a piece of work, and some people I respect a great deal have said some really nice things about it:

This is a brilliant work. Half-mystic and half hard-core intellectual, Brewin here offers us an intimate, personable, completely accessible and, at times, hauntingly beautiful engagement with the hard questions of emergence theology. Phyllis Tickle

With his new book Other, English author Kester Brewin joins Peter Rollins from Ireland and David Dark from the US as leading public theologians for a new generation of thoughtful Christians. He moves gracefully from Scripture to philosophy to pop culture to sociology and back to Scripture again, offering fresh, honest, and needed insights at each turn. Brian D. McLaren

By turns startling, heart-warming and thousght-provoking. Maggi Dawn

A book for mystics and poets and troubadours of a new world. Brewin invites you to look into the eyes of others and squint a little — to see the image of God.  He dares you to see the world with new eyes — to look into the mirror and see one who is beloved, to look into the eyes of the orphan and see Christ, to look into the eyes of those whom we find hard to like and catch a glimpse of the One we love. Shane Claiborne

In our socially networked and technologically advanced world we remain surrounded by mystery: the mystery of others, the divine mystery and mystery that we are unto ourselves. ‘Other’ masterfully explores how we might embrace this often complex reality and draws out how love of that which is other is central to the Christian experience. This is a work of rare beauty. Peter Rollins

Frank Schaeffer also just gave it a 5-star review on Amazon, and I know it’s being used in various seminaries as a key text on theology and contemporary culture. So yeah, do go buy it!

Linkage: US version |  UK version |  Kindle version |  or find it in the iBookstore on your iPad too.

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 thoughts.

Firstly, a warning: another Anders Behring Breivik is coming. They are already planning, stockpiling and fantasising. More people are going to die in a horrible attack, and more people are going to have to grieve lives cut short by high calibre bullets from automatic weapons. This, I’m afraid, is what we can expect if we are to pursue a world that embraces ‘the other.’

Breivik’s hatred, the entirety of his actions, were fuelled by a rejection of an emerging Norway that included people from different backgrounds. Muslims, Somali immigrants… it doesn’t matter who they are really, simply that they are different and are seen by Breivik as contaminating the purity of Norway.

He has a utopian view of Norway, and as I have written in Other, this must lead to violence if it is to be sustained. I quoted Anthony Dworkin, who writes of utopians that:

‘their guiding inspiration is that conflict and coercion can be finessed away by a correct reordering of society… but they cannot fulfil their objectives without attempting to remake human nature, or eliminate groups within society that are seen as agents of corruption or reaction… The real harm came in the 20th Century, when utopians abandoned the idea of withdrawing from the world and instead attempted to remake it.’

Al Qaeda, the far right, Zionists, the British National Party – they are all the same. They have a view of a ‘clean’ world which is not contaminated by ‘the other’ – whoever that may be. They thus have two options: to either withdraw into bounded, closed utopian communities, which they end up having to defend (like Waco) or to go out on crusades and attempt to cleanse the world through acts of violence.

The question we must face is: what will our response be? Unfortunately there will be those who will decide that the best form of defence is attack, and that we must increase security even more, and increase powers to stop and search and encourage people to inform on one another if they suspect they are acting in an ‘un-American’ or ‘un-Wherever’ way. And we must sift through society and violently root out extremism wherever we find it.

You will find terror cells, and some attacks may be prevented, but you cannot eliminate the threat of extremism through force. There is no final act of cleansing which will rid a country of all extremists and thus render it free forever from the threat of extremism.

Instead, we must re-double our efforts to love the other. This is not a blind and foolish love, for it needs to be sensitive to the difficulties people feel when faced with change and difference. Multiculturalism is a far more complex project than liberal elites have assumed. We need to work with people, especially within working class, blue-collar communities who see their jobs under threat and their housing being taken. We need, all of us, to better understand our common humanity, and offer places – TAZ spaces if you will – where people can meet and feast together.

I think it’s really interesting that the mass response from the people of Norway has been a ‘march of the roses.’ Flowers that have always represented love. Would this have been the response in the US or the UK? I wonder.

Perhaps through this tragedy Norway can teach us something about how to respond when hatred boils over into violence. For we know it will happen again. And again. And we need to be ready. Perhaps not with guns, but with roses.

I got back from Wild Goose early yesterday morning and had to travel immediately to work to teach. So just about emerging from a jet-lagged coma and appreciating what a good time, and a good thing, Wild Goose was.

The dream of having an ‘American Greenbelt’ seemed – to talk to lots of US people – an impossible one at times, but it really did happen. There was a great spirit to the event, and though it was small, it had all of the right ingredients to grow properly in the right directions.

It was especially nice for me to hook up with people from the US who are familiar with my work, and to hear about people’s enthusiasm for ‘Other’ and my posts here – thank you, encouragement is so good!

I hope people continue to enjoy the US edition of ‘Other’ which came out recently. Do get a review onto Amazon if you have time. I’d love to spend more time in the US pushing the book and speaking about it, but it’s down to you guys now, so thanks in anticipation to anyone who’s spread the word. I’ll post the audio of my talk as soon as I get time.

I do hope to be back over sometime soon, and have talked about doing a ‘pirates and pyrotheology’ tour with Pete Rollins. But we’ll see. Was great to hook up with so many people – and here’s to Wild Goose 2012.

This time next week I’ll be North Carolina enjoying the inaugural Wild Goose Festival. I’m going to be speaking in the Geodesic Dome venue on Friday evening at 8pm:

Loving Others in a World of Fractures

From noisy neighbours to racism, fundamentalism, issues about immigration and terrorism, the problem of dealing with ‘the other’ has been at the centre of our conflicts, both internal and international. Roping in pirates, poetry and quantum physics, as well as unhealthy does of TAZ, dirt, Facebook and theatre, this session will seek to uncover what Jesus’ instruction to love others might mean in our paradoxically fractured-yet-networked world.

I think there’ll be some beer to be had afterwards too – look forward to catching up with people there! One of the key reasons for my visit (other than to fulfil a life-long dream and share a tent with Pete Rollins and Jay Bakker) is to give the US release of Other a good push in the right direction. (Conveniently, the new compact format of the UK edition is now available for pre-order and is looking great too…)

BUT - I’m just a poor boy from London, so if this is going to fly in the big ol’ US of A then I’m going to need your help dear readers! So, if you’ve read the book – UK or US edition – and liked it, or you just wished you’d liked it, or if you read the other one and liked that instead, then please, consider writing an online review, speaking to people in your networks about it and generally being a superstar.

I can’t claim perfect foreknowledge, but God did say quite clearly that each extra copy you get people to buy will move you 2 rows further forward in the great cinema in the sky. Now we’re talking, eh?!

Seriously though, it would be great if people could spread the news a bit. Some good people have already said some wonderfully generous things:

This is a brilliant work. Half-mystic and half hard-core intellectual, Brewin here offers us an intimate, personable, completely accessible and, at times, hauntingly beautiful engagement with the hard questions of emergence theology.
Phyllis Tickle

With his new book Other, Kester Brewin joins Peter Rollins from Ireland and David Dark from the US as leading public theologians for a new generation of thoughtful Christians. He moves gracefully from Scripture to philosophy to pop culture to sociology and back to Scripture again, offering fresh, honest, and needed insights at each turn.
Brian McLaren

A book for mystics and poets and troubadours of a new world, Brewin dares you to see the world with new eyes.
Shane Claiborne

Masterful – this is a work of rare beauty.
Pete Rollins

Startling, heart-warming and thought-provoking.
Maggi Dawn

Very kind, all of you! The truth is, I really believe in this book. I think it’s timely and interesting… and has a section about pirates. Come on, what more do you want! Seriously though, it would be great to create a buzz about it and, more than that, to start putting some of this into action, from the local through to the national and international. Now more than ever do we need to love our neighbours, and love our own selves properly too, just as we need to love our God.

Hope you can help out, and look forward to catching up at Wild Goose. Get a ticket, it’s going to be sublime.

Fear is a foolish counselor, and it is also an addictive one. As the work of Rene Girard and others makes clear, our national anxieties love to vent themselves on some monster, real or imaginary. We can unite our party, if not our nation, around common aggression against shared fear – even if we can’t unite them around a common vision around shared values.

It’s a very good point. One – rather extreme – etymology of the word community is ‘co-munis’ – people we build walls and fight with. We gather together in common resistance to some greater evil, and when this is vanquished – witchcraft, communism, Islamic fundamentalism, terrorism – we move on to the next thing.

We need something to fear, because without this external fear, we would have no choice but to face the real monster: the monster within.

Christopher Booker’s work on why we tell stories outlines this progression well. The Three Billy-Goats Gruff is a children’s story about facing an external orge… but as we move into more serious stories, the orge turns out to be the ‘self’ that we need to face.

This is one of the key questions I’ve tried to address in ‘Other’ – a book I’m pleased the Brian is a big fan of. We need to address the other within the self before we can properly address the problems of engaging the ‘other others’ who exist externally.

That ‘the West’ and ‘Islamic extremism’ have risen in opposition to one another suggests that they are both experiencing some kind of existential crisis. The west is really not convinced by the spiritual vacuousness of consumer capitalism, and Islamic extremists are not convinced that the Arab / Middle East construct is anything like what Mohammed envisaged. Both need to look within themselves, and somehow try to resolve their problems without conflict with each other.

I wanted to respond to a question that came through Twitter – always welcome, by the way – about the ‘two halves of life’ thesis I mention in Other.

“I’ve just finished the section on ‘Loving the Other with the Self.’ Would you say that our lives are lived in two halves, and that these two halves repeat evermore? In other words, is there an endless evolving look that we go through?’

The salient section from the book is this:

The monk Richard Rohr has spent a great deal of time exploring this idea of life having two halves. To condense his hypothesis dramatically: the first half of life is ideally spent training for the journey that will be undertaken and, as such, will be bound by all sorts of rules and regimes and drills. It is only once these rules have been internalized that we can begin the journey, to step outside of the drills into the real world and become responsible adults.

I see this process happening all the time in my teaching. When students first arrive at the school in my classes, I am very strict about punctuality, about handing homework in on time, about ruling each page with a margin and being precise working things out. It is a very different story for my older classes. Of course, I fully expect them to be on time and to produce high quality work, but by the time they are entering the final couple of years of school, I expect them to have internalized these rules and understand why they are important, in ways that younger students simply cannot do. In this sense, if they then chose to break them, then the responsibility for the consequences is fully theirs: poor grades. But they cannot be given this responsibility from day one.

Every parent knows this is true. We begin with hard and fast rules: never play with knives, never speak to strangers, never run across the road – and rightly so. But it would be idiocy to claim these as unchangeable laws that should go on forever. All adults need to be able to handle knives, speak to strangers, and dodge cars in the city traffic.

Rohr notes that Paul takes chapters upon chapters in Romans to say the same thing, while the Dalai Lama is more succinct: ‘we must learn the Law very well, in order to know how to break it properly.’

The first halve of life is spent learning the law; the second moving outside of the restrictions of that law and into the fuller spirit of it. We need the law in the first half in order to create secure structures, but we also have to move into breaking those laws if we are to be healthy adults. You can buy an MP3 of Richard speaking on this here.

The question then is, is this a one-off cycle, or something that repeats? I actually wrote a piece for Richard Rohr in his Radical Grace magazine a couple of months back, which looked at this very question. My answer there was that there is a grand cycle, the period which stretches over our lifetime, but there are also smaller cycles that exist within this too:

If Rohr is right and one axes of our lives is that they can be seen as having two halves, then my work in education has hinted that this principle can be true for each of the ‘little lives’ we lead too. When we enter the life-cycle of years in school or college we might find that our time naturally falls into ‘two halves’: the first where we create a structure and learn the law, the second where we have internalised those laws and begin to live beyond them. All this is preparation for us to move on from this part of our life to the next, where we may enter the first half again. As the grand sweep of our lives has two halves, so perhaps the little lives that make up our life have two halves too. And it is when we begin to live within this rhythm of learning the law of where we are very well – college, church, job, mission – so that might break them properly, that we will begin to become healthy and wise.

Whenever we begin a job, a project or a community, there will be elements of ‘first’ and ‘second’ halves to it. We will need to begin with more rules in order that we might establish security for people, and safe boundaries. But we must then learn to live outside of them if we are to see them mature. And one of my concerns is that many many churches – and the people who lead them – never get beyond the first half of life, but remain convinced that everything is cowboys and indians, good and bad, black and white. And that’s really very damaging for people.

You can read the whole article here.

Hope that helps.

Although mathematically it turns out that this should be your worst day of the year, given that it’s Martin Luther King day in the US, I hope there’s some level of goodness in it that defeats the equations.

I was reminded by Jay Bakker today that MLK once said, “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” It’s a brilliant testament to a life lived in defiance of a dominant culture of hate. This, remember, is a day to commemorate a man once labelled as ‘the most dangerous in America.’

Loving other people turns out to be a dangerous and risky business. In James Fowler’s Stages of Faith (which I explore in Signs of Emergence – The Complex Christ in the UK) the ‘Stage 6′ is the ‘Universalist’ – those who reach a place of radical acceptance of others. And they are routinely killed. Gandhi, Jesus, Martin Luther King… the list goes on. They are killed because radical love for the other, for the stranger, for the dirty and dispossessed always presents a challenge to the dominant system that has excluded them.

And this is why love for other is always political. To love the homeless but do nothing about homelessness, is to fail to love in depth. For the whites who supported MLK, it wasn’t enough to simply enjoy hanging out with black people, or accept them as friends. The system that oppressed them had to be changed.

And this is the core challenge of a day like today: has the embracing of MLK into a national hero obscured the fact that oppression still exists? By fetishising King, it is easier to ignore his radical message of challenge to the unfair political and social structures that still keeps people down. People can enjoy the day off, but do nothing to change the situation of people who are being oppressed.

And I’ve heard that put no better today than with Vince Anderson’s talk at Revolution NYC yesterday, which you can listen to here.

Really pleased to announce that the UK edition of ‘Other‘ is available in the US and Canada as an eBook via Amazon (as it is in the UK too.) As I’m sure you know, you don’t need an actual Kindle to read Kindle downloads – you can get the software for free on your Mac or PC or mobile. I’ve got a copy on the Kindle app on the iPad, and it looks great.

If you’ve got an iPad, it’s also in the native iBookstore too, but I can’t link to that – sort it out Apple!

As for a print edition, negotiations with a US publisher are in (hopefully) the final stages, and a US print edition should be available in a couple of months, which will be great.

If you’ve not read it yet, ‘Other’ is an attempt to unpack what Jesus’ summary of the law might mean in the politically complex and technologically advanced world we are living in:

Noisy neighbours, international terrorism, racism, teenage violence and religious fundamentalism … from the personal to the local to the international and theological, it is our failure to engage ‘the other’ that is at the heart of so many of the problems we face.

It draws on a huge variety of sources, taking in pirates, AA Milne, Zizek, Facebook, Heidegger, Celebrity culture and video gaming…all spiced with some original poetry too. And some great people have said some great things about it:

Brian Mclaren:

With his new book Other, English author Kester Brewin joins Peter Rollins from Ireland and David Dark from the US as leading public theologians for a new generation of thoughtful Christians. He moves gracefully from Scripture to philosophy to pop culture to sociology and back to Scripture again, offering fresh, honest, and needed insights at each turn.

Pete Rollins:

In our socially networked and technologically advanced world we remain surrounded by mystery: the mystery of others, the divine mystery and mystery that we are unto ourselves. OTHER masterfully explores how we might embrace this often complex reality and draws out how love of that which is other is central to the Christian experience. This is a work of rare beauty.

Phllyis Tickle:

This is a brilliant work. Half-mystic and half hard-core intellectual, Brewin here offers us an intimate, personable, completely accessible and, at times, hauntingly beautiful engagement with the hard questions of emergence theology. It illumines with reverence and care the paradox that is faith, even as it speaks, always with vigour, of love and the reality that lies at the centre of our not-knowing.

Hope you enjoy reading it – all being well I’ll be in the US in the next few months with a little tour, so be great to meet people then and engage with the ideas face to face.

Other Other [1] |  Other Other [2]

In the previous two posts I’ve been trying to tease out some of the issues being engaging ‘the other’ – especially the problem of there being ‘other others’ who we may not have considered when we act.

One response to the exponentially expanding series of others is to do nothing – the other, as I outlined in the last post – is to throw ourselves into things so completely that we just end up burning out.

What I try to do in Other: Loving Self, God and Neighbour in a World of Fractures is find a third way between inaction and burnout, which I call the ‘symbolic life’ and explain in terms of an interesting problem in Mathematics:

In the face of such huge global problems like climate change, international terrorism, religious extremism, poverty, obesity, racism, mass immigration, urban blight, gang warfare, teenage alcoholism, alienation, addiction and depression, one wonders if it is ever worth acting at all. With such a list of problems ranging from the world-wide through to the national, provincial, local and personal, would it not simply be better to blinker our eyes, stupefy our minds, log on and tune out?

There will be those who claim that nothing can be done in the face of such a multi-faceted crisis: there is no society, there are only feint shadows of community left in our towns, fading traces of once-deep relationships and deeply-rooted families. One might as well live for the moment, and live for oneself. I believe we must ignore those voices, though it is true that the situation we face is complex.

There is a well-known question in Mathematics called the Three Body Problem. The trajectory of one body, the future path of one particle with a given mass and initial velocity, can be calculated easily. The interaction of two bodies – a hypothetical moon orbiting a hypothetical earth – can also be calculated without much difficulty, and the paths that they will follow be predicted with some certainty. But the simple addition of a third body causes the problem to spin into total incalculability. Given just an earth, a moon and a sun, each with a mass and initial position and velocity, the future trajectory of these three interacting bodies cannot be calculated. There are simplifications and special cases, statistical analyses and algorithms that allow us to guess the tides and seasons with some confidence. But there can be no solution.

Love God, love your neighbour, as you love yourself. God as sun, me as ground and you as just one, orbiting other… Just the three of us form a system so complex that not even all man’s mathematics, nor the machines he has built can calculate with certainty if we will collapse into one another, spin endlessly apart or settle into some periodic stability.

Yet, even more than this, we live in a universe of near infinite bodies. The complexities of the three-body problem pale into insignificance as more than 6 billion of us interact in this worldwide asteroid belt of varying gravities, weights and velocities. So in this sense the sceptics are right: there can be no calculation. The system is too complex. My movements, me, a single body in a swirling crowd of billions, are too small to matter, to crowded with complexities to compute.

To the materialist eye, this is all that can be said. But for those of us who refuse to collapse the paradox of our existence into simple material facticity, or inflate it with vain hope of total transcendence, there exists an in between place, a temporary, generous, heretical, artistic, loving, transforming place where the differential calculus does not reign, and where five loaves and two small fish just might equal a meal for thousands. It is a place away from the hard and calculating cartography of the empire, a place beneath the maps where the normal laws do not apply, and a where a merry life of piracy and risk can be enjoyed, if only for a short while.

What this means is to live a ‘symbolic life’ – not pretending that my great actions will save the world, but neither rejecting the possibility that actions can change things:

We should not to fool ourselves that we will be heroes, whose great actions will save many. Rather, we must aim to be simple heirs, working with symbols that speak of a greater reality to come.

In fact, offering symbols is sometimes all we can do in this vastly complex world. Signs point towards one thing. Symbols do not point, but rather act as conductors between two spaces, between the transcendent and the imminent, the possible and the impossible, the material and the immaterial. When Jesus lifted the bread above his head and gave thanks for it, he moved it into symbol, into a liminal space between the physicality of the bread he was touching, and the meta-physical of the bread he was becoming.

As the body of Christ in a complex world, this should continue to be our model. As the community of the now-and-not-yet, the Pirates of the Charism, we should seek to live in the risky place of mystery, in the imaginative space of symbols. This is what the role of the priest should always have been – to stand symbolically in the space between the immanent and the transcendent, and conduct.

It is to this symbol life that students throw themselves when they protest. Some will say that marching is futile, but we have to believe that to march, to be seen to be present and in solidarity, is to present a powerful symbol that the status quo is not satisfactory, and even if we can’t change it easily, nor will we give the powers that be the satisfaction of getting away with things without voices of dissent being heard.

Do go buy the book – so many people have said so many kind things about it, and I strongly believe it’s an important message in these weird time. It’s provocative, stirring…and the perfect Christmas gift!