My buddy Greg sends me names of authors from whom he thinks I would benefit. Very often he hits the bull’s-eye. He tends to find them via YouTube and/or podcasts. So he gives many a listen and shares with me some he thinks I need to be familiar with, and I am grateful.

Paul Kingsnorth is a most interesting writer and thinker. He came out of an eco-terrorism globalist background. He tried Buddhism. He tried atheism. But he could not shake the realities of creation as beautiful (so there must be an Author who is beauty Himself). And he could not shake the realities of conscience (the moral law within put there by the Author of life). And he could not rid himself of his own sin nature (his depravity was clear to him; he did not lie to himself). And on and on it went.

Why steward creation if man is just matter in motion, he asked himself.

The biblical view of creation, of man, of sin, of redemption–it alone explained the totality of man and his place in the cosmos. Such was the outcome of Kingsnorth’s intellectual pilgrimage.

This book by Kingsnorth is of his pilgrimage before he became a Christian. I could not put it down. Why? Because of its being so well-written, for one thing, but also because it was authentic. He did not hide his struggles, his questions, his anxieties about his desires for him, his wife, their children, their leaving London and moving to the countryside in Ireland. It was simply beautiful.

Again, in this book, Kingsnorth does not detail his becoming a Christian, but if you enjoy seeing a person following ideas to their logical outworkings, following ideas to their consequences, this is a beautiful read. It’s also about his struggles to express himself well and to do it with honesty.

Thank you, Greg, for turning me on to Kingsnorth.

In reading through Kingsnorth’s books, I found that he is a fan of Claire Keegan, and so I picked up one of her books, too. An Irish writer, and wow!, what a beautiful storyteller of terrible abuses against Irish girls. Condoned by the Roman Catholic Church and the Irish government, this is a story of abused girls under the covering of false religion and power. Keegan’s story of what Furlong finds (Furlong is the main character) will break your heart, if you have one, and you’ll be better off because of it.

Tolle Lege.