Kester Brewin

Jonny has written again defending the ‘in and out’ stance he wants to take with institutional forms… And though it often seems to be falling on deaf ears, I want to support this view too! Jonny wrote a response to my posts reflecting on whether those who had been involved in the Emerging Church movement [...]

In ‘No Exit’ – what is considered to be his best play – Sartre wrote the line ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres‘ which is commonly translated as hell is other people. I was reminded of this last night hearing AC Grayling introduce Zizek, who had written in the Guardian that the worst job he had ever [...]

London is continually fascinating. As humans we are always quick to project personalities onto our creations; London the person is complex, darkly funny, steeped in history, welcoming all but criticising many, intelligent, crafty… a heavy drinker who enjoys the night. ‘London Nights‘ looks like a brilliant series of 10 radio programmes, looking at the city [...]

Election Thoughts [1] | Election Thoughts [2] | Election Thoughts [3] In the previous post I concluded that the terrorising dimension of the pressure to choose is not simply down to our ignorance of what the choices might mean, or even our ignorance of what we actually want, but our fear of not really knowing who [...]

Election Thoughts [1] | Election Thoughts [2] In the previous two posts I’ve tried to set out a critique of the choice agenda that main parties are promoting, and also the ‘rights’ / devolved power agenda that is a central tenet of the Conservative Party manifesto. The key question that was rightly asked yesterday was [...]

In the previous post, I argued that the ‘choice’ agenda that all parties are keen to promote is actually something of a fallacy. Genuine choice of political representation in the kind of democracy we have is pretty much an illusion, and choice in delivery of services like health and education would actually require surplus capacity, [...]

In the previous two posts { [ 1 ] [ 2 ] } I’ve been wondering whether a certain symmetry of relationship is needed if empathy is going to flow between two people. The springboard for this was Zizek critiquing the adage ‘an enemy is a friend whose story I have not yet heard’ by [...]

I’m currently enjoying one of Zizek’s new books, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce – an allusion to Marx’s introduction to his Eighteenth Brumaire in which he wrote: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the [...]

Whenever we engage ‘the other’ we have to overcome our fear of doing so. Engagement that holds no such fear is not engagement with an ‘other’; it is easy to love what is lovely – we are called to overcome our fear and love that which is not. As we consider the grounds of the [...]

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. [...]