“Is there anything left to conserve?”
This question served as a prompt for Paul Kingsnorth’s talk at unHerd in London last weekend. I’ve been reading Kingsnorth’s essays on Substack for about a year. He writes about the decaying world of modernity, his quest to retrace the experiences of the desert monastics, and his late in life conversion to Orthodox Christianity. His voice is one of deep thought and contemplation. Reading his essays strikes something in me every time. He was a reluctant convert, and even now his writing is filled with the tension of his religious beliefs and the modern world we inhabit. I feel that same tension, though I am not an Orthodox Christian, or a Christian in any sense of the term. There is something deeply compelling about his essays, and this talk is a sort of condensed summary of many of these themes.
To watch the talk, click here.
If you’d rather read the published transcript, click here.