Thanks Kevin. I'd be interested in looking into whether it's possible to have an informal gathering of Abbeyites in New York - city or state - when I'm there. If you and/or others would like to help make something happen that would be great.
Excellent! All I’ll need are the best dates & times for you and I can book a space in the city. If you have the time, upstate too.
We have The Cloisters on the northern tip of Manhattan. A beautiful place for the Abbeyites to gather. Lots of options. Some spots near where you are speaking too if that helps.
We’ll make sure your visit is a warm, convivial one with no stress! Or at least our gathering won’t be the source of it!
I would love to be part of this. I am down in Cornwall on Hudson - next to West Point. Doubt I can get into the city for the lecture event itself but a meetup near or N of the city would be fab.
St Tikhon's Orthodox Monastery and Seminary is a short distance away from NYC in Northeast Pennsylvania, outside of Scranton. I cannot promise anything at this early date, but they are publishing my photo book on American Monasteries, and might be open to hosting a talk or gathering. I know the abbot of the monastery, and the manager of the press personally. You might at the very least consider making a pilgrimage there, "where saints have walked." Interestingly, our priest here in Birmingham, Alabama, occasionally posts your writings in the weekly bulletin!
I'd love to visit St Tikhon's, and as a pilgrim would probably be best. Let's see what God wills. Would love also to hear more about your book. One day I need an American Orthodox pilgrimage ...
Mr Kingsnorth, Is the current post public? I'd like to share the link to it with others. If it is not public, may I at least provide them with a quotation from it? I have in mind the paragraph that begins, "This, then, is what I do here now."
Thank you for always illuminating. Sorry for the passing of your neighbor- Memory Eternal, may that person dwell with the blessed. A little worried about you coming stateside; not the best of times, but if you do, do not fly on a Boeing aircraft.
Please do! As I write this, going on the fifth episode of electrical grid failure this year due to storms, and not even really big ones. Also related to poorly/never maintained infrastructure. Gov’t too busy bombing people to worry about that and help out the local utilities. Hard to live off-grid here in NJ, wish I could.
When maintaining the empire is more important than maintaining the infrastructure at home, you know you're deep into imperial overreach. The power grid fails here all the time too, though not due to empire so much as incompetence ....
Have a 4 month old puppy and just spent almost $300 at the Vet yesterday. Our 2 dogs have great healthcare and eat everything I do, dont have to work, are Loved on and kept safe. Would have been really cool if somewhere in the Scripture dogs were mentioned other than comparing humans to dogs eating scraps from the Lords table. But thats how it really is so I guess its "As above so below ". Love the little doggys anyway and they bring alot of joy.
All of this is great news. Your thinking on the machine is really gaining traction, which is most excellent. May this only grow.
Being originally a New Yorker--and not having returned there in many a year--I am seriously considering joining you in October, if possible. It might be a bit late for seeing that baseball game. We can hope the Yankees--yes, the Yanks!--make it to the postseason.
I'd love to meet, Jack. I want to make a meeting in New York happen and it seems I'll have help from readers here. And if there's a baseball game on, I'm taking you up on your deal!
I'm interested to see how your Orthodox Christian writing grows as compared to the Evangelical Christianity that I was taught. I don't see The-Universe (God) as a living being, but as Love Energy as defined in the Bible. The teachings of Jesus are born in us everyday as The-Christ, and it's up to us to stay connected. What label you or other people put on me is your definition, but I will enjoy comparing the different approaches.
EAP, my humble thanks for this. Perhaps you have told this story before, but for any of us readers here, am glad I could conjure up these recollections of that encounter with with you and KR. I, for myself visit(ed) his very early work ( I called him BabyKeanu to my students; I teach ancient civilizations...) when I showed his portrayal of Prince Siddhartha in Little Buddha. He was magnificent in it and gave me and all my students over the years a vision of India plus or minus 300 to 600 years (newer evidence puts a temple to him in the 500s BC range). I do not read reviews and so never knew how he felt about that movie, but it was magnificent. He seemed spiritually seeking then (maybe just a rent check?) or at least gave out the presence of such (good acting?). He is around darkness, but perhaps his future holds something else? Have to say, Orthodoxy has been a place for metanoia for many, many people, when they saw the need, in their time, at least before their last breaths anyway, it was there with the right answers... inner work can be hard but forever worthwhile...
Your post took me into the heart of a backstage event, the closest I've been to such. Hope you took it well. Perhaps Paul and his readers here took it well. Such fun then. Stay centered.
Yes, but does he know what he's into. Probably, but is this a good example of playing with fire? It can't be just innocence. Dopamine chasing? Certainly none of my business, but ...
It depresses me that neither Paul nor Martin Shaw could find anything meaningful enough in the church in the UK, either Catholic or Anglican, Presbytarian or Methodist to make that the basis of their returns to faith. This is our history and the source of our culture and once our spiritual and moral life as a country. Are we going to leave the CofE to be managerialised by the Paula Vennells ( surely she should not be giving communion or holding any office in the church after what we have now discovered about her via Mr Bates vs the Post Office) and the Justin Welbys of this world? Surely we should be taking British Christianity back from people like these. Are we saying the Roman tradition has had nothing to offer since the schism and only the East has answers. Is that what Paul thinks? Confused and depressed.
The Western Church has the gift of theosis, but it is misplaced like a treasure hidden under heaps of a hoarder's clutter. We are so preoccupied with culture war distractions and trivia such as gossip about papal airplane interviews and what words are politically or doctrinally acceptable.
If we only knew about what we had - particularly before the West went technocratic and colonialist - just how vast it is, we would forget all that other stuff. For example, look at John Ruysbroeck: https://enid.w.uib.no/files/2012/05/faesen_final.pdf He would be a wild saint, and one of the main images of him meditating in a forest with flames descending on him is reminiscent of Martin Shaw. And look at the The Cloud of Unknowing. And, more recently, Thomas Merton.
And, while we're in the west, Gothic architecture has close kinship: aesthetically, symbolically, and metaphysically with old-growth forest: John Muir recognized this.
I hope to write more about this. What I think - and I have a lot more to learn and a long path to walk, but this is my instinct - is that in Britain (and Ireland) we need to go back to our roots. I find those roots in the early saints and practices of the pre-Schism church: ie, in the times before east and West broke apart. To a lesser but still meaningful degree I find inspiration in the pre-Reformation medieval church also.
I don't think that 'Rome has nothing to offer', but I do think it has gone wrong and needs to come home again. My view broadly is that the east-west Schism cut the heart out of the Western church, and that the head began to dominate, which led by a winding road to the 'reformers' trying to reset the church, which then accidentally led us into secular modernity.
The CofE as it exists now is a shell of a church: almost an anti-church, I think. Part of me would love to be Anglican, but I can't. The meat of the faith has gone from the church. But I think that the coming of the Orthodox to the West might help us one day bring it back. The current shell will need to die off. But seeds can then be allowed to grow again.
Thank you for taking the trouble to reply so thoughtfully. I agree with much of what you say. I certainly share your preference for the Mediaeval church. But that spirit does still exist within stray corners of the Anglican establishment to this day, and that's what I'd love to find some way of preserving. I wish more people were working to drag the church back in that direction or maybe drag those bits of the church away from today's Anglican establishment and into something new. Or back toward something much older. I'm incredibly lucky to have stumbled accidentally into Saint Barts in London about three years ago. It is one of those places where, as our vicar says, the veil between this world and the next feels thinner than normal. The legend behind the creation of this particular church is something worthy of Martin Shaw's story telling. Prior Rahere was a courtier of Henry 1st, sometimes described as a court jester. He travelled to Rome on a pilgrimage but while there fell dangerously ill. He prayed desperately to be saved. Finally in a fevered dream, he saw Saint Bartholomew, who told him his life would be spared, on condition he returned to London to found a priory and hospital. Which he did in 1123. Barts as a hospital survives to this day of course. Barts the church has the most extraordinary atmosphere. It is packed with ghosts of our past. It survived two plagues, the Great Fire and the Reformation. Charles Dickens was once secretary of the PCC. Just being there, I feel what you describe feeling at the various wells and shrines you visit - a connection to our spiritual history. In another stroke of good fortune, the current Rector Marcus Walker, is committed to preserving all of that. He is the Chairman of Save The Parish, an organisation that he and Giles Fraser founded to battle the centralising, managerialising tendencies of the current church establishment. He runs the place as the highest of high churches. Every ancient ritual and symbol is preserved. We have a professional choir who sing in Latin. The quality of the music, with the acoustics of that building frequently reduces me to tears. Father Walker has a Mediaeval historian on his team, who ran a wonderful course on the early history of Christianity in England. At Epiphany we were given pieces of chalk he had blessed, to mark the New Year above our doors. He believes in the church as a collection of parishes, each with its own character and agenda, the whole being a kind of sum of the parts. But I'm rambling. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I want my faith today to spring from and still be connected to this country's past because those are my roots. Faith fulfils so many functions. It embraces everything. We were created not just with hearts but with heads. I don't see why we must choose between the two. Faith has things to say about government, art, beauty, purpose, love, and morality, down to the smallest acts of day to day personal behaviour but also up and out to the very boundaries of human thought and language and then beyond these. I guess each of us has to find our own way through all of this. But I am greatly indebted to you and to your writings for lighting the path.
My family’s front door is marked with Epiphany chalk from St Barts, too! 👑 We live too far for it to be our parish church, unfortunately. For those of us trying to raise children acquainted with Christian belief in England, there are vanishingly few churches (of any denomination) that offer meaningful fellowship with other families.
I’d be very grateful for more writing on this. I’m a homeschooling mother of two boys. We are all groping our way toward Christian faith, and our evangelical C of E church (worship pop songs with electric guitars, video games for the youth club) sometimes feels like we are fumbling in the wrong direction.
I think I agree with both Paul and Jane here. Sadly the C of E is in a parlous state - decaf religion at best - the more 'relevant' it tries to be the more irrelevant it becomes. Yet, those 'stray corners' can still (just about) be found if one looks hard enough. I run a place called St Antony's Priory in Durham (hopefully also one such corner) where we'll be celebrating our patronal festival tomorrow (it being St Antony's day), and I'll be preaching about how Christianity is now the 'old religion' and, well, I haven't quite worked out the rest of my sermon yet...!
I know very little about puppies... Do they have teething pains, too ? I know that they are a handful to educate, though, though fortunately their education seems to come in a concentrated form that makes things critical for a shorter period of time.
Watching my thirty year old kids dealing with the things that exhausted us, among which, teething pain, and waking up in the night to comfort a child/puppy ? with teething pain, that can be pretty exhausting.
Puppies certainly have teething pains. Ours is currently chewing everything in sight. But as you say, they are easier to train than babies and quicker to learn ...
Congrats Paul on delivering this year’s Erasmus Lecture. Happy to help host/organize a meetup of your subscribers when you are in town.
Thanks Kevin. I'd be interested in looking into whether it's possible to have an informal gathering of Abbeyites in New York - city or state - when I'm there. If you and/or others would like to help make something happen that would be great.
Excellent! All I’ll need are the best dates & times for you and I can book a space in the city. If you have the time, upstate too.
We have The Cloisters on the northern tip of Manhattan. A beautiful place for the Abbeyites to gather. Lots of options. Some spots near where you are speaking too if that helps.
We’ll make sure your visit is a warm, convivial one with no stress! Or at least our gathering won’t be the source of it!
I can come up with an idea for a venue or two in the Kingston, NY area should you need a hand.
I would love to be part of this. I am down in Cornwall on Hudson - next to West Point. Doubt I can get into the city for the lecture event itself but a meetup near or N of the city would be fab.
And if you could consider coming south, say Texas, there are many in this region who could make it happen.
Texas is big.. But it’s’ center is Dallas. :). Meet here!
I would do a road trip up there in a heartbeat!!!!! And would draw a more focused audience.
Paul could arrange a roadtrip south to a Monastery he would find welcoming, Holy Archangels...
St Tikhon's Orthodox Monastery and Seminary is a short distance away from NYC in Northeast Pennsylvania, outside of Scranton. I cannot promise anything at this early date, but they are publishing my photo book on American Monasteries, and might be open to hosting a talk or gathering. I know the abbot of the monastery, and the manager of the press personally. You might at the very least consider making a pilgrimage there, "where saints have walked." Interestingly, our priest here in Birmingham, Alabama, occasionally posts your writings in the weekly bulletin!
I'd love to visit St Tikhon's, and as a pilgrim would probably be best. Let's see what God wills. Would love also to hear more about your book. One day I need an American Orthodox pilgrimage ...
I attend the lecture each year and would love to attend a meetup of readers in the NYC area
Same, Elizabeth. Erasmus is phenomenal. I think we’d have a great group for a meetup convenient to Paul’s schedule too.
I've started a chat thread for people to talk about this. See the note above.
Hey Paul, thanks....I don’t see the chat thread...
https://substack.com/profile/15572817-paul-kingsnorth/note/c-47151144
Mr Kingsnorth, Is the current post public? I'd like to share the link to it with others. If it is not public, may I at least provide them with a quotation from it? I have in mind the paragraph that begins, "This, then, is what I do here now."
Yes it is, please share around if you'd like.
Paul, maybe you could elaborate what you meant about the balance between career and family. How your view of that has changed?
Thank you for always illuminating. Sorry for the passing of your neighbor- Memory Eternal, may that person dwell with the blessed. A little worried about you coming stateside; not the best of times, but if you do, do not fly on a Boeing aircraft.
My visit is conditional on the US still existing at that point. I haven't booked my tickets yet. Maybe I'll sail.
Please do! As I write this, going on the fifth episode of electrical grid failure this year due to storms, and not even really big ones. Also related to poorly/never maintained infrastructure. Gov’t too busy bombing people to worry about that and help out the local utilities. Hard to live off-grid here in NJ, wish I could.
When maintaining the empire is more important than maintaining the infrastructure at home, you know you're deep into imperial overreach. The power grid fails here all the time too, though not due to empire so much as incompetence ....
Maintaining or expanding the empire ?
I'm seeing the same thing in France : an incapacity to keep the knowledge alive that will allow us to transmit the capacity to keep up infrastructure.
Also, the inherent problems of putting too many eggs in one basket take their toll in the long run.
We have catacombs and an ocean-side refuge or two here. Paul will be under the protection of Our Lady of the Rosary while here.
Have a 4 month old puppy and just spent almost $300 at the Vet yesterday. Our 2 dogs have great healthcare and eat everything I do, dont have to work, are Loved on and kept safe. Would have been really cool if somewhere in the Scripture dogs were mentioned other than comparing humans to dogs eating scraps from the Lords table. But thats how it really is so I guess its "As above so below ". Love the little doggys anyway and they bring alot of joy.
Looking forward to 2024. These days I consider myself a cooked barbarian. Although not a Christian - been a Druid these 12 years - I enjoy reports from other’s paths. This poem states where I’m at , if I may venture an unfashionable medium : https://open.substack.com/pub/danoneill/p/lines-for-the-landless?r=3zg2g&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Paul-
All of this is great news. Your thinking on the machine is really gaining traction, which is most excellent. May this only grow.
Being originally a New Yorker--and not having returned there in many a year--I am seriously considering joining you in October, if possible. It might be a bit late for seeing that baseball game. We can hope the Yankees--yes, the Yanks!--make it to the postseason.
I hope all is well with you. -Jack
I'd love to meet, Jack. I want to make a meeting in New York happen and it seems I'll have help from readers here. And if there's a baseball game on, I'm taking you up on your deal!
I would love to meet as well. Nuts to all this virtual stuff.
I will see what I can do. I just might be able to put it all together in 10 months.
I'm interested to see how your Orthodox Christian writing grows as compared to the Evangelical Christianity that I was taught. I don't see The-Universe (God) as a living being, but as Love Energy as defined in the Bible. The teachings of Jesus are born in us everyday as The-Christ, and it's up to us to stay connected. What label you or other people put on me is your definition, but I will enjoy comparing the different approaches.
Polycrisis? Metacrisis? Apocalypse? All three? Anybody else hoping for a Pageau - Kingsnorth - Schmachtenberger meet-up in 2024?
I'm up for it!
God bless you, Paul, and everything you do this year and in the future. To your family, too, and all subscribers here a joyful and rewarding 2024
Paul, everything you write takes me into your path before 3 years ago until now, and mine that started in 1994 and saw its fulfillment in 1997.
In today's posts on that site, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-12950659/Keanu-Reeves-release-debut-novel-British-weird-fiction-author-China-Mi-ville.html, I am imagining what it would be like for Keanu Reeves to take a similar path as you did, especially seeing his comic book endeavor, and the 9-year old boy in the pic being "his biggest fan." He looks to be yoked with a particular dark writing colleague (whose early book Kraken I still cannot unforget).
Thank you for all you do. I will revisit my coursework in Rewilding soon...
EAP, my humble thanks for this. Perhaps you have told this story before, but for any of us readers here, am glad I could conjure up these recollections of that encounter with with you and KR. I, for myself visit(ed) his very early work ( I called him BabyKeanu to my students; I teach ancient civilizations...) when I showed his portrayal of Prince Siddhartha in Little Buddha. He was magnificent in it and gave me and all my students over the years a vision of India plus or minus 300 to 600 years (newer evidence puts a temple to him in the 500s BC range). I do not read reviews and so never knew how he felt about that movie, but it was magnificent. He seemed spiritually seeking then (maybe just a rent check?) or at least gave out the presence of such (good acting?). He is around darkness, but perhaps his future holds something else? Have to say, Orthodoxy has been a place for metanoia for many, many people, when they saw the need, in their time, at least before their last breaths anyway, it was there with the right answers... inner work can be hard but forever worthwhile...
Your post took me into the heart of a backstage event, the closest I've been to such. Hope you took it well. Perhaps Paul and his readers here took it well. Such fun then. Stay centered.
Yes, but does he know what he's into. Probably, but is this a good example of playing with fire? It can't be just innocence. Dopamine chasing? Certainly none of my business, but ...
The deterioration of society worldwide should not be surprising. Jesus mentioned it as quoted in Matthew 24:6-11 and Luke 18:8b.
If my memory serves me correctly I read not too long ago over 100 countries are at war either within their borders or outside.
Satan is alive and well. His pedigree being a liar and murderer.
It depresses me that neither Paul nor Martin Shaw could find anything meaningful enough in the church in the UK, either Catholic or Anglican, Presbytarian or Methodist to make that the basis of their returns to faith. This is our history and the source of our culture and once our spiritual and moral life as a country. Are we going to leave the CofE to be managerialised by the Paula Vennells ( surely she should not be giving communion or holding any office in the church after what we have now discovered about her via Mr Bates vs the Post Office) and the Justin Welbys of this world? Surely we should be taking British Christianity back from people like these. Are we saying the Roman tradition has had nothing to offer since the schism and only the East has answers. Is that what Paul thinks? Confused and depressed.
Failing is what it is all about perhaps? All is not lost and especially we can hope people. Paul and Martin are still grounded in these holy lands - I live near the legendary Cuthbert coast - often not a comforting place - its wild out there now. Paul has a great illustrator https://ewancraig.substack.com/p/stcuthbert-of-lindisfarne?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
The Western Church has the gift of theosis, but it is misplaced like a treasure hidden under heaps of a hoarder's clutter. We are so preoccupied with culture war distractions and trivia such as gossip about papal airplane interviews and what words are politically or doctrinally acceptable.
If we only knew about what we had - particularly before the West went technocratic and colonialist - just how vast it is, we would forget all that other stuff. For example, look at John Ruysbroeck: https://enid.w.uib.no/files/2012/05/faesen_final.pdf He would be a wild saint, and one of the main images of him meditating in a forest with flames descending on him is reminiscent of Martin Shaw. And look at the The Cloud of Unknowing. And, more recently, Thomas Merton.
And, while we're in the west, Gothic architecture has close kinship: aesthetically, symbolically, and metaphysically with old-growth forest: John Muir recognized this.
I hope to write more about this. What I think - and I have a lot more to learn and a long path to walk, but this is my instinct - is that in Britain (and Ireland) we need to go back to our roots. I find those roots in the early saints and practices of the pre-Schism church: ie, in the times before east and West broke apart. To a lesser but still meaningful degree I find inspiration in the pre-Reformation medieval church also.
I don't think that 'Rome has nothing to offer', but I do think it has gone wrong and needs to come home again. My view broadly is that the east-west Schism cut the heart out of the Western church, and that the head began to dominate, which led by a winding road to the 'reformers' trying to reset the church, which then accidentally led us into secular modernity.
The CofE as it exists now is a shell of a church: almost an anti-church, I think. Part of me would love to be Anglican, but I can't. The meat of the faith has gone from the church. But I think that the coming of the Orthodox to the West might help us one day bring it back. The current shell will need to die off. But seeds can then be allowed to grow again.
Here is something I like on that score:
http://orthodoxengland.org.uk/trust.htm
Thank you for taking the trouble to reply so thoughtfully. I agree with much of what you say. I certainly share your preference for the Mediaeval church. But that spirit does still exist within stray corners of the Anglican establishment to this day, and that's what I'd love to find some way of preserving. I wish more people were working to drag the church back in that direction or maybe drag those bits of the church away from today's Anglican establishment and into something new. Or back toward something much older. I'm incredibly lucky to have stumbled accidentally into Saint Barts in London about three years ago. It is one of those places where, as our vicar says, the veil between this world and the next feels thinner than normal. The legend behind the creation of this particular church is something worthy of Martin Shaw's story telling. Prior Rahere was a courtier of Henry 1st, sometimes described as a court jester. He travelled to Rome on a pilgrimage but while there fell dangerously ill. He prayed desperately to be saved. Finally in a fevered dream, he saw Saint Bartholomew, who told him his life would be spared, on condition he returned to London to found a priory and hospital. Which he did in 1123. Barts as a hospital survives to this day of course. Barts the church has the most extraordinary atmosphere. It is packed with ghosts of our past. It survived two plagues, the Great Fire and the Reformation. Charles Dickens was once secretary of the PCC. Just being there, I feel what you describe feeling at the various wells and shrines you visit - a connection to our spiritual history. In another stroke of good fortune, the current Rector Marcus Walker, is committed to preserving all of that. He is the Chairman of Save The Parish, an organisation that he and Giles Fraser founded to battle the centralising, managerialising tendencies of the current church establishment. He runs the place as the highest of high churches. Every ancient ritual and symbol is preserved. We have a professional choir who sing in Latin. The quality of the music, with the acoustics of that building frequently reduces me to tears. Father Walker has a Mediaeval historian on his team, who ran a wonderful course on the early history of Christianity in England. At Epiphany we were given pieces of chalk he had blessed, to mark the New Year above our doors. He believes in the church as a collection of parishes, each with its own character and agenda, the whole being a kind of sum of the parts. But I'm rambling. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I want my faith today to spring from and still be connected to this country's past because those are my roots. Faith fulfils so many functions. It embraces everything. We were created not just with hearts but with heads. I don't see why we must choose between the two. Faith has things to say about government, art, beauty, purpose, love, and morality, down to the smallest acts of day to day personal behaviour but also up and out to the very boundaries of human thought and language and then beyond these. I guess each of us has to find our own way through all of this. But I am greatly indebted to you and to your writings for lighting the path.
My family’s front door is marked with Epiphany chalk from St Barts, too! 👑 We live too far for it to be our parish church, unfortunately. For those of us trying to raise children acquainted with Christian belief in England, there are vanishingly few churches (of any denomination) that offer meaningful fellowship with other families.
I’d be very grateful for more writing on this. I’m a homeschooling mother of two boys. We are all groping our way toward Christian faith, and our evangelical C of E church (worship pop songs with electric guitars, video games for the youth club) sometimes feels like we are fumbling in the wrong direction.
Father Andrew helped me through some tough patches some years ago. His depth and breath were a gift to me.
I think I agree with both Paul and Jane here. Sadly the C of E is in a parlous state - decaf religion at best - the more 'relevant' it tries to be the more irrelevant it becomes. Yet, those 'stray corners' can still (just about) be found if one looks hard enough. I run a place called St Antony's Priory in Durham (hopefully also one such corner) where we'll be celebrating our patronal festival tomorrow (it being St Antony's day), and I'll be preaching about how Christianity is now the 'old religion' and, well, I haven't quite worked out the rest of my sermon yet...!
Thanks Paul! Looking forward to your new book.
Hi agan Paul! Have you read Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld? If not I think you may appreciate it.
Good luck with the puppy, Paul.
I know very little about puppies... Do they have teething pains, too ? I know that they are a handful to educate, though, though fortunately their education seems to come in a concentrated form that makes things critical for a shorter period of time.
Watching my thirty year old kids dealing with the things that exhausted us, among which, teething pain, and waking up in the night to comfort a child/puppy ? with teething pain, that can be pretty exhausting.
Good luck.
Puppies certainly have teething pains. Ours is currently chewing everything in sight. But as you say, they are easier to train than babies and quicker to learn ...