Kingsnorth-'Living In Wonder' Weekend

A Postcard From Alabama

3 Christian Prophets, Of A Sort: Jonathan Pageau, Martin Shaw, Paul Kingsnorth

Gotta apologize for all the Living In Wonder material now, but hey, we’re only a few days away from publication, and I’m now in Alabama getting ready for the launch. I’m staying with my buddy Ed and his family in Birmingham. Ed’s a subscriber to Walter Kirn’s newspaper County Highway, which I’ve been dying to see, but I live where they call a county highway a “megyei autópálya,” so I can’t see it. Man, it’s terrific!

I’m hearing from some of you that the link to the audio version of Chapter 9 of Living In Wonder, which I posted to a second newsletter yesterday, does not work. I’m going to repost here. It works for me:

I had also posted a PDF of Chapter 1, but some of you say it didn’t work either. I’ll repost here — that link works for me — though you can read it all on yesterday’s Substack (open even to non-subscribers). Sorry for the hassle — maybe I got the embedding wrong, as I was rushing to get that out before catching the connecting flight to Birmingham.

Say a prayer for our friend Warren Farha, owner of Eighth Day Books, who is now on his way to Alabama to sell Living In Wonder at Monday night’s book launch event. I posted yesterday that it was your last day to get in an order from him for a signed copy of the book. I understand he was deluged. When he gets here late tonight, I’m going to be spending four hours straight signing them. I think we sold something like 900 or more copies in advance through Eighth Day, the exclusive vendor for signed copies. I’m so grateful to you all for your support.

Take a look at this story from a while back (unlocked by me) from the NYT on Warren and his terrific bookstore, which arose out of a great personal tragedy. Future orders from Eighth Day Books will likely feature a bookplate signed by me. From now till next week, pre-order elsewhere, via this link.

Warren will also be here selling copies of Paul Kingsnorth’s books at Paul’s event on Friday night, I believe, and probably also at the event featuring both Paul and me on Saturday at the Greek Orthodox church. Paul will be on hand to sign at both, and I’ll be there to sign at the Greek church too, if you come.

I want to share with you another passage from Living In Wonder — this from a chapter on “three prophets” who are rethinking Christianity in a new way that’s returning it to its ancient roots. The prophets are Martin Shaw, Jonathan Pageau, and Paul Kingsnorth (see above). Here’s an excerpt from the Kingsnorth passage:

Sitting by the fire in an Irish country pub, Kingsnorth tells me that Orthodoxy challenged his received idea of what Christianity is. Having been raised in a Protestant country that had largely cast off its ancestral faith, Kingsnorth had the idea that Christianity was about nothing more than arranging your thoughts and feelings in a certain way, going to church on Sunday, and being a kind person. As a young seeker, he saw in the churches around him nothing but dead ends.

“We have a political crisis and a technological crisis today, but what’s at the root of it is a loss of connection to the earth,” Kingsnorth says. “Young people want that, and so they’ll go off to become activists, or maybe get into neo-paganism. What they really need, I would say looking back, is a spiritual path that connects them to the earth, which is a legitimate thing. You’re not going to get that in the Church of England. But you do get it in the Orthodox faith, interestingly. It’s not earth worshiping, but it fills in what’s lacking in Western Christianity: the mysticism.”

Kingsnorth faults the Reformation, especially in England, with severing the link between heaven and earth, so to speak, by closing the monasteries, stripping the churches of holy images, banning holy wells and other natural things the faithful thought connected them to God—all in the name of purifying it from the perceived taint of Catholicism. “All you’re left with is a very rational, very intellectual, very masculine idea of God,” he says.

The thing is the cultural habit of rationalizing and abstracting has also made serious inroads into Catholic life and practice in the West. The crisis, Kingsnorth concluded, is not so much one of Catholic versus Protestant as it is of Eastern Christianity versus Western Christianity. It is a conclusion I arrived at not long after I left Catholicism for Orthodoxy in 2006, the result of a great spiritual trauma. I had thought of Catholicism as a mystic-friendly form of Christianity—which it is, but only by comparison to Protestantism. When seen from the East, both Catholicism and Protestantism—in the West, at least—are marooned primarily in the head and are futilely trying to think their way out of the civilizational shipwreck of the modern West.

Though Orthodoxy shares with Catholicism a fundamentally sacramental metaphysics, in practice Orthodoxy is far more mystical, emphasizing that the conversion of the heart must precede the conversion of the intellect. It does not deny the intellect, only orders it within an anthropological hierarchy.

One aspect of Orthodoxy that particularly appealed to Kingsnorth is its panentheism—the principle that God is, as the Orthodox prayer says, “everywhere present and filling all things.” It’s not the same as pantheism, which says that the material universe is God. Orthodoxy teaches that God is separate from his creation but also interpenetrates it with his energies, or his force. Consider how the warmth and pleasant glow of an English hillside on an August afternoon occur because the faraway sun penetrates the grass, the flowers, and the earth with its energies. The hillside is not the sun, but it testifies to the presence of the sun in its material being.

“The earth is not God, but God is there, present in nature, not in some far-off heaven,” Kingsnorth says. He goes on: “He’s deeply entwined in everything. Creation is the book of God, as Augustine said, I think. That is explicitly recognized in Orthodoxy. So what I was finding, weirdly enough, was a sort of ancestral Christianity that my ancestors in England would have had access to, and that the early Celtic saints certainly had access to. When I became Orthodox, a lot of people said to me, ‘Welcome home,’ and, strangely, it did feel like I was coming home. It felt like there’s something here that we had, that we lost.”

Here are Paul and me at the Irish country pub where that interview took place in 2023:

Come see us in Birmingham tomorrow and Saturday if you can! Newsletter continues below for subscribers. Why ain’t you one? It’s cheap, and there’s loads of content.