Intermission: Coming Up, Laid Down

Plus two questions for my readers

Hello readers. This is a brief intermission between essays (the next will be with paid subscribers next week) to alert you to some upcoming events and a few things I’ve recorded recently. Also, I’d like to hear your opinions about a couple of things …

Events

In just over a month’s time I’ll be giving my illustrated talk about cave Christianity at the Percy French Festival in the Irish midlands. If you came to my recent Dublin event you’ll have seen the talk, but I’m only one speaker on a day themed around ancient Christianity and its lessons for the future, which looks really intriguing. Alf Monaghan’s lecture on how the Egyptian desert fathers created the Irish (and British) church is worth the admission price alone. If this sounds like your bag, you can see the festival’s timetable and agenda here.

Then, in October, I’m making a foray over to the US of A, where I’ve been invited to give the keynote address at this year’s Front Porch Republic conference. If you don’t know FPR, you should, and you don’t have to be American to find their work valuable. It’s proper localism, for barbarians both raw and cooked. You can pre-book a place at their Wisconsin gathering here.

Podcasts

I’ve done a lot of talking on the Internet this year - probably too much - but here is one last batch before I shut up for a few months:

• I spoke to Freddie Sayers of Unherd, in a wide-ranging chat about my work, life, opinions, domestic arrangements and other scintillating matters. You can watch that at the link above.

• I spoke to Gavin Ashendon of the Catholic Herald about Christianity in the West, AI, collapsing churches, the problem with Jordan Peterson and other things:

• I spoke to Justin Brierley and Belle Tindall for their new podcast Re-Enchanting, about Christianity, Wicca, conversion, demons on the Internet and that sort of malarkey:

• In an entirely non-religious conversation, I spoke to Julian Vigo about socially constructed reality vs objective truth, and about transgenderism and its relationship to transhumanism, for her podcast Savage Minds.

  Paul Kingsnorth

• Finally, something a bit different. Mexican voiceover artist Gabriel Porras was so taken by my 2021 essay The Cross and the Machine that he recorded it as a spoken-word piece, and then told me about it afterwards. I rather like hearing my words expressed in a Mexican accent. You can hear what that sounds like here:

Most of these, and quite a lot of other things, can be viewed directly on my YouTube channel.

Two Questions for my Readers

People have asked me to do a lot of this kind of talking over the last year or two, as these essays have reached a wider readership. I’ve said no to a lot of requests. The ones I’ve said yes to were conversations that I thought would either [a] be useful for others to hear, or [b] be interesting for me to do, or ideally [c] both.

But I’m never quite sure how much to say, or how to say it, or how useful these things really are. It’s not as if there is a shortage of people talking on the Internet. Sometimes I feel I should be doing more of it, and sometimes none at all. Mostly I land somewhere in the middle. This seems to be how my thought processes work.

But for as long as I am going to do it, I want to do it well, and the more people are watching, the more I think I should probably try to hone my craft a bit. Public conversation is not my natural medium: that would be the written word, which I can cogitate over for weeks with nobody looking. Usually, for a podcast conversation, I just turn up and talk. I often watch or listen to these things and think I could have done better.

With that in mind, I have two related questions for my readers. I will welcome honest answers.

Question One is for those of you who listen to my Unherd conversation with Freddie Sayers. I’d be interested in your feedback. Something is itching at me about my performance here, which I’m not sure conveyed my work very well. Or maybe it did. I’m really not sure. Of course, different conversations and events have a different feel, different interviewers and different audiences, so the work of the speaker is not the same each time. On this occasion, the idea was to give a general introduction to my work. Maybe I did OK at that, but I have the feeling I could have been more interesting, or pointed, or direct, or something. Or could I? In the end, it is impossible to judge yourself, so I would like to hear what my readers think.

So please do tell me. I’d especially like to hear the views of those who know my work. Critical feedback is fine: in fact, critical feedback is most useful to me. You can be as negative about my performance as you like, on condition you are also useful. Feel free to tell me I’m useless and boring: but please also tell me why I’m useless and boring, and how I could be something else instead. Improvement is the aim of the game.

Question Two is somewhat related, and also has a bearing on what I’m going to be up to after my summer break. There is a possibility that I might start hosting a podcast. Talks are ongoing, as they say. If this happens I will need to know how to host conversations (hence the desire for feedback) - but I will also need some interesting people to talk to. This is where you come in.

If I do end up doing this, it will build on the work I’ve been doing here at the Abbey. I want to focus in particular on the spiritual crisis at the root of the frgamentation we see all around us, and how to respond to that. How should we practice as cooked (or even raw barbarians), and what is the way forward as the Machine ramps up and the illusions fall away? I have my own ideas about who I’d like to talk to on this broad theme, but I’d like to hear yours too. If I do end up doing this, who should I talk to? I’m particularly keen to find people who aren’t already appearing on every podcast going. All suggestions will be very gratefully received.

Thanks in advance to anyone who weighs in on either of these topics. Consider it your homework for the summer. I’ll be back next week with another long read.

Blessings,
Paul