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1 day ago | 
paulkingsnorth.substack.com | Paul Kingsnorth
A very happy St George’s Day to all of my English readers - and, indeed, to any readers in Georgia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Malta, Ethiopia, Moscow or Genoa, all of which claim the dragon-slayer as their patron. He’s a well-travelled saint, is George. I don’t think he ever visited any of these countries - he certainly never set foot in England - but perhaps that’s a measure of success. Globalisation isn’t a new phenomena. Last year, I wrote a piece here about the ‘English soul’ to mark our saint’s day.
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4 days ago | 
paulkingsnorth.substack.com | Paul Kingsnorth
The force that through the green fuse drives the flowerDrives my green age; that blasts the roots of treesIs my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked roseMy youth is bent by the same wintry fever. What is this force, this force that through the green fuse drives the flower, that through my bones drives a weariness more often now, that through the rocks drives the water? Is it time, merely? Encroaching death?
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5 days ago | 
thefp.com | Paul Kingsnorth
I have never met anyone quite like Paul Kingsnorth. He used to be the kind of radical environmentalist who chained himself to bridges. He’s been an atheist, a Zen Buddhist, and a Wiccan. He spent his first few decades of life searching, as so many of us do, for something deeper. Call it “the meaning of life.” Then, a few years ago, Paul found it—in the Romanian Orthodox Church.
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1 week ago | 
paulkingsnorth.substack.com | Paul Kingsnorth
Hello readers. This is just a quick update on a few things going on - but before I get started, I want to offer up a big thank you to those American readers who responded to my recent request for book tour invitations. I have to say, I didn’t anticipate how overwhelming that response would be. I have had over a hundred invitations to events, bookshops, universities, conferences, churches, monasteries and peoples’ front rooms, from all over your very big country.
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1 week ago | 
paulkingsnorth.substack.com | Paul Kingsnorth
The Temple Church, London, EnglandWhat do Rosamund the Fair’s lover King Henry II and Renowned Author Dan Brown, creator of the humungous bestseller The Da Vinci Code, have in common? Only this: they have both spent time in London’s only round church. But this - as we can see from the quality of its clientele - is not just any church, and its roundness is not the only thing that makes it unusual.
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2 weeks ago | 
paulkingsnorth.substack.com | Paul Kingsnorth
How should a Christian write a novel? It's a question that occupies me these days. I am both a Christian and a novelist, and I haven’t yet worked out how to fit the two vocations together. For me, this is a mid-life problem. I became a Christian quite unexpectedly about five years ago in my late forties, after a long spiritual search through other traditions, having been brought up with none. Before that, though - long before that - I was a writer.
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2 weeks ago | 
paulkingsnorth.substack.com | Paul Kingsnorth
Godstow Nunnery, Oxford, EnglandAll the best religious stories start with a vision, and so it is with the story of Godstow Nunnery, the ruins of which still inhabit the floodplain at the top of Port Meadow in Oxford. This vision was gifted to a certain Dame Ediva in the early 12th century.
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3 weeks ago | 
paulkingsnorth.substack.com | Paul Kingsnorth
Hello all. This is a message aimed at Abbey readers in the USA, of whom I know I have quite a few these days. It’s about my forthcoming book Against The Machine. Against The Machine will be published in North America on 23rd September (although you can pre-order it already if you just can’t wait.) As part of the process of trying to get people to buy the thing, I’ll be coming over to the US for a speaking event in New York City on 28th September: there’ll be more news on that here when I have it.
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3 weeks ago | 
carolineross.substack.com | Caroline Ross |Paul Kingsnorth
I am away visiting family and friends in Scotland. More about that another time. This week, something I have been meaning to do again for a while, but keep forgetting to share - a largely visual post. Late in 2014 I read a glowing review by Lucy Mangan of The Wake by . My copy arrived, a green man staring out from the cover, and I sat on the tiny sofa in my boat for two days, compelled to read to the very end, sometimes in tears.
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3 weeks ago | 
paulkingsnorth.substack.com | Paul Kingsnorth
The Martyr’s Memorial, Oxford, EnglandWhy has Christianity declined so steeply in the West over the last century or two? Whole libraries of books have been written on this question, and we could probably all choose our favourite culprit depending on our perspectives and prejudices. The Reformation. The scientific revolution. The French revolution. The theory of evolution. The ‘migration of the holy’ from church to state. The rise of the state. Capitalism. Liberalism. The sexual revolution.
