Fellow Creatures: December 2011

About Me

Location: Whitstable, Kent, United Kingdom

CJ Stone has written six books: Fierce Dancing (Faber & Faber 1996), Last of the Hippies (Faber & Faber 1999), Housing Benefit Hill (AK Press 2001) the Trials of Arthur (with Arthur Pendragon, Element Books 2003), the Trials of Arthur Revised Edition (The Big Hand 2012) and the Empire of Things (Gonzo Multimedia 2013). Columns have included Housing Benefit Hill and CJ Stone's Britain in the Guardian Weekend, On The Edge in the Big Issue, On Another Planet in the Whitstable Times and Written In Stone in Prediction magazine. He is currently working on two new columns, and his latest book, the "biography" of a well-known supernatural being. He lives in Whitstable in Kent and, when not at his desk, is a part-time postman, which he describes as "like a four-hour workout every morning".

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Fellow Creatures at Christmas: a Ranter's Yuletide Fable: Those of you who know me will know that I am obsessed by the Ranters.

They were a sort of anarchist spiritual cult who flourished, briefly, in the period of the interregnum between the end of the English Civil War and the restoration of Charles II in 1660. They were Christians, but they took on a particularly radical form of Christianity known as antinomianism. “Antinomian” means “against the law”. It refers to the doctrine of free grace, by which it is understood that Jesus came to overthrow the law, to forgive our sins and that therefore, we cannot sin any more.