Podcast

Culture

S&U interviews

3 June 2023

4 min read

My conversation with... Paul Kingsnorth

Re-enchanting... Nature. Belle TIndall reflects on an infectious conversation with Paul Kingsnorth, the celebrated author, poet and environmentalist. Finding him a particularly enjoyable guide through the daunting landscapes of belief, environmentalism and AI.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A sitting man speaks into a microphone will gesturing with one hand

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What would you get if you were to combine a weighty appreciation for the beauty and power of nature with an unexpected conversion to Orthodox Christianity, topped off with an unwavering aversion to smartphones?

Well, you would get something resembling a Paul Kingsnorth.

Paul is an award-winning poet and a best-selling author of both fiction (including the Buckmaster Trilogy: Wake, Beast and Alexandria) and non-fiction (including Real England, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and his ongoing Sub-Stack series: Abbey of Misrule). He is, and always has been, an advocate for treating the natural world as if it were far more than a machine to be used or a resource to be obtained. Such behaviour is, according to Paul, nothing short of sacrilegious. As well as an enchantment with what he can see and sense in the natural world, he also has a long-standing fascination with all things mystical. He is, much to my own delight, somewhat of a real-life Gandalf the Gray. If it were not for his London accent, he could easily belong in the pages of Tolkien’s literary world.

And just one final thing to note about Paul Kingsnorth, since 2021 he has been horrified to find himself a Christian.

‘…in the end I just thought oh, maybe I’m a Christian. Damn.’

Well, actually, that’s unfair of me to say. It’s obvious when talking to Paul that the horror quickly dissolved, and wonder and awe became its swift replacements. But nevertheless, initially he could have rivalled C.S Lewis for the title of ‘the most reluctant convert in all of England.’ As tempted as I am, Paul tells his own story so powerfully (both in his writing and in our conversation for the Re-Enchanting Podcast), that I shan’t even attempt to tell it for him here.

But what I will say, is that we need people like Paul: the eccentrics, the contemplatives, the fearful, the awe-filled, the critics, the mystics. They're essential.

The actress Jennifer Coolidge, in her Golden Globes acceptance speech for her (unforgettable) performance in the show White Lotus, paid tribute to its creator, Mike White. It was an oddly insightful tribute. She said,

‘if you don’t know about Mike White, this is what you should know – he’s worried about the world. He’s worried about people. He’s worried about friends that aren’t doing well. He’s worried about animals…’

and she continued gushing in this vein while the camera panned to Mike weeping in the audience.

As I was recording this particular episode of Re-Enchanting and listening to Paul talk, Jennifer’s speech kept playing in my mind. After approximately one hour in his company, I can’t claim to know Paul Kingsnorth well, but what I do know of him makes me want to pay a similar tribute:

‘if you don’t know about Paul Kingsnorth, this is what you should know – he’s worried about the world…’

And, just as Jennifer Coolidge seemed to be towards Mike White, I found myself profoundly thankful that he is.

There was nothing nonchalant about our conversation with Paul, deep fascination seems to be his signature disposition towards most things, and perhaps therein lies the source of so much worry. When one is deeply fascinated or emotionally invested, assured of meaning, or perhaps even continually in awe of something; how can worry for its welfare not also be present? To worry about something is to care, it is to render it worthy of your worry, and Paul seems to render us all worthy of his. Why? Well, in his words, because

‘if God is an artist, which I think he is, then nature is his artwork. And we’re a part of it too, incidentally. We’re natural too.’

Therefore, the fact that we seem to have lost sight of this, and subsequently fractured our relationships with each other, with the natural world, and with God, is a crisis of the most spiritual proportions. And Paul cares.

I feel it is at this point that I must offer a disclaimer: my conversation with Paul Kingsnorth was a delight. It was, to borrow a familiar phrase, re-enchanting and I enjoyed it to no end.

While it is true that he leads us into some weighty topics (the terrors of AI, the disaster of being so divorced from the natural world, the problems woven into the very make-up of our society), he is a particularly enjoyable guide through what can be daunting landscapes. He may have an eye for detecting doom, but he seems to do so with a personable lightness. Like I say, he’s Gandalf, just without the staff.

It also helps that alongside a diagnosis, he so enthusiastically offers up what he believes to be a cure,

‘The more you have to answer these questions: what is a human? What is nature? What is the world? The more people will be ready for actual, serious, Christianity again. Full-strength Christianity. Not the weak version, the real thing. And I think that’s starting to happen, I can feel it.’

Paul’s episode of Re-Enchanting is well worth an hour of your time, his infectious fascination with all things nature is worth infinitely more.

Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.