Kester Brewin

Tag: Religion

  • 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…

  • Stones

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    If we could all just stop throwing stones, and stoop, knees bent and write in the dust, we’d see that the dust was once stone – grand, and hard, and proud, and tough – now ground and dissolved in grace and tears. So… how much better to be a grain of dirt on that kind…

  • More Papal Bull… “If It’s Not Catholic, It’s Not A Proper Church”

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    The Times reports today that "The Vatican has described the Protestant and Orthodox faiths as “not proper Churches” in a document issued with the full authority of the Pope." "The Orthodox church suffers from a wound because it does not recognise the primacy of the Pope. The wound is even more profound in Protestant denominations,…

  • Is The Emerging Church Hopelessly Utopian? [3]

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    Hopelessly Utopian [1] Hopelessly Utopian [2] Thanks for the comments on the above posts. In response to Cheryl and Becky, yes, of course every church movement has felt ‘no one else has ever felt this way before’. And it’s actually important to recognise that, as Gray does in Black Mass, suggesting that ‘the utopian instinct…

  • Is The Emerging Church Hopelessly Utopian? [2]

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    In the previous post, I outlined John Gray’s recent conclusion that, post-Iraq (and thus, essentially, post Neo-con), post-Communism, post-Marxism, post-Nazism, the grand utopian ideas of the 20th Century had proved themselves failures, and that we should all give up on grand political visions. I paralleled that with some of the disenchantment I’ve seen expressed about…

  • Is The Emerging Church Hopelessly Utopian? [1]

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    In this month’s Prospect, Anthony Dworkin explores the idea of utopias. Utopian ideas have been a disaster in the twentieth century: Nazism, Marxism, Communism… and we can go further back in history to see their failures in both political and religious manifestations. In the 19th Century many utopians tried to create perfect societies in their…