Wild Unreasoning
Martin Shaw & Paul Kingsnorth in Conversation
Hello friends, so in under two weeks I'm leathering into a world tour of Dartmoor – five nights in intimate, lovely venues. I'll be digging out fairy tales I haven't told for years, stories of the saints, mad little Devon folk tales, each night will be a stroll around the moors lifting a lantern on that evening's dollop of imagination. Folks in this neck of the woods, it’d be lovely to see you there. Final tickets and more details here: Martin Shaw, Dartmoor Astray.
Over at Jawbone, you may enjoy another glimpse into The Trouble with Beauty. Then we’re into a conversation over a pint with me and Paul at a Dartmoor pub…
Paul & Martin outside St Pancras church, Widecombe, Dartmoor, spring 2025.
Suddenly I can see all of England from above, almost like a map. I can see all the old pilgrim roads lit up like capillaries, and emanating a bright gold glow. The night shape of Albion is braided with these warming criss-crosses of light. Mossy crosses are repaired again, saint named, candle-bright to encourage all apostles of the road. The little beasties of the hedgerows dig deeper into their dens, the winged ones up in the majestic beeches settle into their nests. All is a hymnal, at least for a moonlit moment.
I need to walk more lanes barefoot. Kiss more icons. I need to take refuge in more old churches. A theology of the body. I’m tired of the sensible. I want to say yes to the universe, and the one that made it. I need to know my Bible better, I need to know my compassion better, I need to know my joy better.
I need to feel more like a Christian.
Experiencing the Merrie, pilgrimage in Walsingham, November 2023
It was a pleasure to be reunited on Devon soil with Paul last weekend. We were jumping into the last weekend of The Skinboat & The Star (new dates soon to be announced) and we gave ourselves an extra day to generally catch up before the adventure began. Paul gave a lively talk on nature and the saints, and I even persuaded him to give us some poems. Ex-Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams joined us, who – in his wise, humble and deeply eldered way – reduced us all to happy rubble over the gathering. His intuitive prayer by a smokey Dartmoor fire will be with me for the rest of my life. The Ruach came.
What you have here is before all that. This is the synopsis:
Two creaky old friends gather in a pub on the moors and talk about the joy of ancient English churches and it all goes from there: the indignity of reasoning, the power of place, Orthodoxy reminding the West of something essential, that our sins live in the dust, the church residing in the mouth of Jonah's whale.