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

Listen now

Watch now

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.

Article

Care

Culture

Mental Health

12 May 2025

3 min read

Separating mind and body still stigmatises mental health

Our minds and bodies are meant to be inseparable.

Rachael Newham

Rachael is an author and theology of mental health specialist.

Two bird sit on wires facing in opposite directions.

Eduardo Soares on Unsplash.

I recently had a somewhat surreal experience whilst trying to get two consultants to agree to some treatment I needed to have.

One was a cardiologist, the other a psychiatrist - both consultants, working in the same geographical area - and I found, to my surprise, that there was no recourse for my physical health records to be viewed by the psychiatrist and vice versa.

And as I went through the process of trying to mediate between these two professionals, it made me reflect that whilst in theory there is agreement that our minds and our bodies are one and that they cannot be treated wholly separately, the reality is something rather different.

Mental and physical health problems are, in fact, treated as entirely separate entities, with different trusts and funding models in place to deliver care and treatment for mental illness and physical illness.

Now, there is probably a bureaucratic reason for this, but I believe it uncovers a perhaps unconscious belief that our minds and bodies are distant relatives at best, and not only that, but our mental health is still the poorer relation - best ignored unless it’s particularly bothersome.

I think this separation sits at the heart of the stigma that mental health problems still face - a stigma that persists even in the mental health system. It has ancient roots. Go back to ancient Greece and its philosophers. They held to a doctrine where the body and soul were completely separate - our bodies are simply houses for our souls. In a way, the stigma that exists about mental health is the inverse of this- that our minds are less important than our physical bodies and that caring for mental health always comes second to caring for physical health.

Yet, also in those ancient times, the Bible's treatment of humanity shows that we are creations of mind, body, and soul—all equal, beloved, and cared for by God. In Mark’s gospel, we read that the command to love God and one another is multi-faceted: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” To love one another, then, means we need to care for one another’s mental health as well as physical health and strength, as we love with our minds and bodies.

In truth, we cannot care well for ourselves or one another without considering both our mental and physical health. To ignore the mental strain of physical illnesses like cancer, and ignore the physical pains that mental illnesses cause, such as their effects on digestion and blood pressure, is to ignore significant parts of people's suffering.

In the Old Testament of the Bible there is the story of Elijah, one of the great prophets who flees from a murderous ruler and, whilst spiritually and physically exhausted, begs God for death. “I have had enough, LORD,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.”

These are words of desperation that echo those who struggle with their mental health, and God’s reply to Elijah’s pain is to meet him with an encounter with an angel who urges him to sleep and eat, comforting him with the words “the journey is too much for you”. There is no reprimand for Elijah’s suffering, simply comfort for a tortured mind and provision for an exhausted body.

The answer, then, is to treat ourselves and others as the embodied creations we are, with mind and body inseparable and interconnected in ways that even science cannot quite explain or articulate.

The answer is to trust in the embodied hope of Christ, who chose to save us through not only his bodily crucifixion and resurrection, but through experiencing the breadth and depth of human emotions so that we may never again feel alone in them.

Both our bodies and our minds matter to God, and we need to see that reflected in society, where we care not just for single ailments, but the whole person. We need not just an awareness of our minds, but an understanding of what it means to be mentally healthy, as well as a recognition of the horrors of mental illness. Only then, I believe, can we see a society which cares and serves those most in need not simply as isolated symptoms, but as valuable creations.