About Paul Kingsnorth
Welcome to the Abbey
‘No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crises of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid the folly and live his life in order. ’- Eric Voegelin
What I Do Here
I launched this newsletter in early 2021, to publish a series of essays analysing what I call ‘the Machine’: to get the heart of it, and to understand how to live with it. I finished this work in mid-2023, and it turned into a book which was published in 2025.
Over those two years, I wrote myself into an explicitly spiritual understanding of our place and time. I came to see that our culture’s problems - problems I had been obsessively digging into for decades - were not economic, political or technological, and neither were they to be ‘solved’ by intellectuals or scientists or activists. I came to believe that our society is spiritually wounded, and barely even knows it.