Paul Kingsnorth Wants Us to Worship Nature

Paul Kingsnorth celebrated his 50th birthday in a cave in County Clare, Ireland, as a storm swept over the landscape. “Great nails of rain hammered down,” he wrote. Centuries earlier, the ascetic St. Colman Mac Duagh spent seven years in the same cave, searching for God. Kingsnorth, a recent convert to Orthodox Christianity who moved to Ireland with his family from England about a decade ago, has been on a similar quest: “I want to know what’s real,” he told me in July. “I want to know what’s true. And I also want to know why the world is going mad.”