Kester Brewin

Was kindly invited by my publishers to have dinner with Dallas Willard last night with a few others. Dallas has a new book out called Personal Religion, Public Reality?: Towards a Knowledge of Faith which he talked a little about, leading to a very interesting roundtable discussion about what exactly knowledge was or could be. [...]

Great story circulating at the moment about one Chris Jarvis ‘the Southend Jedi knight who refused to dehood in his jobcentre and has now received an apology from the manager for the lack of respect given to his “religion or beliefs”.‘ Jarvis says: “I am a Star Wars follower. It means following the Way of [...]

[ Lock In [1] ]  [ Lock In [2] ] [ Lock In [3] ] Our interaction with technologies does have an effect on our personhood. While we may not be gadgets, our tool-use is actually an important part of our personhood. It is one of the things that makes us human. The danger that Jaron [...]

The people who brought you the ‘there’s probably no God, so just relax and get on with life’ have created a new campaign aimed at parents. They want to encourage parents to give their children freedom of choice. The campaign urges parents not to label children with their beliefs. The key problem here is, of [...]

Interesting article from last year by Alain de Botton on the possibility of a ‘Religion for Atheists.’ De Botton is clear: ‘by getting rid of God, one would also be dispensing with a whole raft of very useful, if often peculiar and sometimes retrograde, notions that had held societies together since the beginning of time.’ [...]

I finally got round to watching ‘Reverend Death’, Jon Ronson’s documentary about George Exoo, a Unitarian minister who has performed around 100 ‘assisted suicides’, mainly for those who have been turned down by other organisations practising legally in places/states where it is carefully controlled because they do not have terminal illnesses. Most of the people [...]

Another excellent programme from BBC’s In Our Time, which this week looks at Soren Kierkegaard. It’s a really good introduction to his thinking, and has some wonderful sections around the idea of subverting those who consider themselves to ‘be’ Christians, and how Kierkegaard considered this to be impossible… There’s also an honest confession from a [...]

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 [...]