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

Comedy

Culture

Film & TV

1 May 2025

4 min read

Last One Laughing: we’re less in control than we think

"Humour is human" and deeply strange.

Jonny Torrance

Jonathan is a priest and theologian who researches theology and comedy.

A montage shows a group of comedians trying not to laugh.

Amazon MGM Studios.

10 comedians shut in a room. Last one to laugh wins.

It’s a simple concept, and with the addition of a few gimmicks, including games and surprise guests, Last One Laughing delivers on it. The show isn’t creative – there have been at least 27 previous versions in various languages – but it is successful and is a much-needed boost for Amazon Prime, whose content has tended to flop recently.

I enjoyed the show. It amused me, which is what it was supposed to do. I didn’t necessarily laugh out loud, and I think I probably would have enjoyed all the comedians doing their own standup better. Some of the comics have made their infectious laughter such a part of their charm that it was a bit bizarre seeing them crack jokes without having a giggle (I’m looking at you Bob Mortimer).

But overall, I had a good time watching Last One Laughing. I was entertained and I would recommend it. Jimmy Carr is unusually likeable as a host, though I wanted to hear more from Roisin Conaty, whose role as co-host was almost non-existent. Richard Ayoade was his normal genius self. And there were a few genuinely standout moments: I think my favourite was Rob Beckett whispering to Joe Wilkinson “you’ve doing a really really good job of showing off, lots of funny bits."

In fact, as that moment suggests, the show is probably at its best when it gets a bit meta, as the comedians reflect on their own comedy and what it is like to be a comic. Moreover, there is a genuine warmth between everyone, and an appreciation of each other’s talents, which gives the show a particularly endearing tone.

It’s good, mindless, not particularly clean (definitely not family friendly!), fun.

So Last One Laughing doesn’t tell us much we don’t already know. It’s not supposed to. It’s light entertainment.

Comics are funny.

Often the unexpected makes us laugh.

Not laughing can be very hard.

This last point, though, is perhaps worth thinking about a bit further. It is familiar to everyone. Who hasn’t felt the physical pain of trying to restrain the giggles in a moment when we really must not laugh?

But this is one of those things that is so familiar we often miss how strange it is.

Philosophers since Aristotle have speculated that laughter is one of the things that makes humans unique, since we don’t know of any animals that laugh. Whether the claim about human exceptionalism is correct or not (and I confess I remain agnostic about this), it does seem that laughter is a practically universal experience of human beings. As Philosopher Simon Critchley puts it, “humour is human.”

But if this is true, then laughter as a phenomenon also highlights some of the eccentricity of our humanity. For, as Last One Laughing shows us so clearly, laughter is only ever partially under our control.

Our bodies, our spirits, even our minds, can betray us at any moment. That something we don’t want, even something good like laughter, can erupt from within.

We often like to imagine ourselves as rational beings, whose lives are characterised by making informed and free choices. We think we are in charge, at least of ourselves, and that we move through the world intentionally, with purpose and direction.

And yet, into this nice picture of a life under control, laughter breaks in, often uncontrollably. Our muscles spasm. Our eyes stream. Our vocal cords erupt in strangely animal snorts and grunts.

The fact that professional comedians and actors can’t maintain a straight face, sometimes in the face of their own jokes (take a bow Daisy May Cooper), should remind us that there is much in ourselves that is beyond our conscious control. Our laughter almost always has cognitive content. It involves our minds. We laugh at things.

But it is always embedded within a body. Laughter, with all its bodily shakes and muscle twitches, sometimes just can’t be kept in, no matter what our minds and consciousness tells us.

Christianity has long been aware of our lack of control. Paul, writing to the church in Rome, lamented that “I do not do what I want to, but I do the very thing I hate.” St Augustine, one of the greatest theologians of the Western Church, wrote in the fourth century that “I had become to myself a vast enigma.” Martin Luther, the sixteenth century German theologian, began the Reformation and changed history, in part over an insistence that we are far less in charge of ourselves than we like to think.

Yet such writers do not counsel despair. Instead, they allow our lack of control to point to our need for God and his help. Paul, a few verses after the previous quotation, cries out: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Now, for all these authors, the stakes are high – they are talking about sin, death and damnation. The comedians in Last One Laughing are playing a much more relaxed game, all that they stand to lose is pride. Yet they too, one by one, discover that they “do not do the thing they want.”

And so, they are learning a version of a Christian lesson – that we are less in control of ourselves than we might like to think. That our bodies, our spirits, even our minds, can betray us at any moment. That something we don’t want, even something good like laughter, can erupt from within.

Now most of us, most of the time, probably enjoy the uncontrollability of laughter. It’s one of the things that make comedy enjoyable, both to watch and to perform. But it should maybe make us aware of other, less benign losses of control. Or at the least it should remind us that there is much in us that escapes our attempts at self-mastery.

Last One Laughing reminded me that laughter is stranger than we think. Just as I am stranger than I think.