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. All the while, he’s been writing, with remarkable clarity, about why it’s so difficult in the modern West to feel spiritually whole.
Paul told me the story of his journey, and his conversion, last Easter on “Honestly.” (You can catch up with the episode here.) This Easter, he’s written an essay for The Free Press about another man’s unlikely conversion. A man who, some believe, ought to become the next American saint. A man I’d never heard of, until Paul stopped by the office in New York City last fall and told me the story of Seraphim Rose.
This radical monk, according to Paul, is the patron saint of anyone in the West who feels lost, in the deepest sense.
This is the tale of how he was found. —BW
Last year I was invited to give a talk about Christianity and nature at Canisius University in Buffalo, New York. After the talk, I took some questions from the audience. One of the questions, asked in sweet innocence, was a deadly honeytrap for a visiting Englishman:
“What do you think of America?”
I had just been talking about the dangers to the soul of the technological culture of Silicon Valley, and the impact of its machine-like ways of thinking on the world, so I said the first thing that came into my head. This is rarely a good idea, especially in public.
