Kester Brewin

Tag: Culture

  • Oiticica | The Mundanity of Beauty

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    I spent a wonderful afternoon at the Tate Modern on Monday, and caught the Oiticica exhibition. If you’re in London, I highly recommend it. I thought the curation was excellent: a full sense of progression in the artist’s ideas. In the case of Oiticica, whose native Brazil is so famous for it’s colour and flamboyance,…

  • Rites of Passage | Atheists Marking Life’s Big Events

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    Interesting piece in this week’s Time Out: atheist Tim Arthur talks about the privilege of being asked to be ‘celebrant’ of friends’ marriages. He has done so four times, and wonders if he’s asked because he is a theatre director and has a degree in religious studies: people think he’s like a vicar, and he…

  • Web 2.0 | It’s All About the Sacred | Festival and Carnival

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    I guess sometimes you can’t see the woods for the trees. I recently posted a piece about René Girard’s thoughts on the essentiality of the sacred to human experience – something Dawkins et al ignore in their anti-religion positions – and I also posted something on Facebook and friendship. But it took a beer with…

  • No More Our Father? | IVF, Sexuality and the Father Figure Clause

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    I’m not one for ‘natural order’ arguments, but part of me is drawn that way over the news that the ‘father figure’ clause currently in British IVF legislation is potentially going to be dropped. A government joint committee report “took issue with the proposal to remove the current requirement for IVF clinics to take into…

  • What A Friend We Have In Facebook | The Buddy of Christ

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    As I’ve recently posted, I’m enjoying using Facebook a lot. (Though for how long, with a big court case looming?) One concern though: the nature of ‘friendship’. I’m not sure what the etiquette is regarding friendship requests, but one thing is certain: you have to decide early on on some sort of policy about who…

  • Religion: Ignore God, It’s About The Sacred

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    This month’s Prospect carries an excellent short essay outlining some arguments against Hitchens, Dawkins et al: ‘the evangelical atheists, shouting from their pulpits’. The author, Roger Scruton, is surprised by ‘the extent to which religion is caricatured by its current opponents, who see it as nothing more than a system of unfounded beliefs about the…