Dr Paul Allen

Paul Kingsnorth is a novelist, essayist, and poet living in Ireland. Below is his journey from Zen Buddhism tro Wiccan to faith in Christ. We must have been fifteen or sixteen when we discovered the church visitor’s book. It was an old church, maybe medieval, and I would pass it with my school friends on our way to the town center. I’m not sure what possessed us to go in; it might have been my idea. I’ve always loved old churches. For a long time, I would tell myself that I liked the sense of history or the architecture, which was true as far as it went. Like the narrator in Philip Larkin’s poem “Church Going,” I would venture into any church I found, standing “in awkward reverence . . . wondering what to look for,” drawn by some sense that this was “a serious house on serious earth.” ­Obviously, there was no God, but still: The silence of a small church in England had a quality that couldn’t be found anywhere else. This visit was less serious. A fifteen-year-old boy with his schoolmat...

What will it mean, when God is dead? Australia is about to become an atheist nation. The census shows us that barely half the population identifies as Christian while nearly a third nominates no religion. The numbers of believers will be bolstered by immigration but the trend is unmistakable. The old beliefs are dying out. Our trek to radical unbelief follows much of western Europe. The same trends are evident in the US . Though religious belief is stronger there, it has lost the elites and over time elite opinion leads public opinion. The eclipse of Christianity will be like the eclipse of the sun. Darkness will be the result. Will it be a temporary darkness or a long night of the Western soul? In abandoning God, we are about to embark on one of the most radical social experiments in Western history. It is nothing short of the reordering of human nature. Short of war, nothing is as consequential. Human beings create themselves inside a culture. A culture without God wi...

Now that the moral revolutionaries are solidly in control, what is to be demanded of Christians who, on the basis of Christian conviction, cannot join the revolution? The demands have now been presented, and they represent unconditional surrender. The latest terms of surrender were delivered last week by Mark Tushnet , William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School . In a stunningly candid essay, Tushnet declared a total liberal victory and chastised his fellow liberals for what he called a “defensive crouch liberal constitutionalism ” that is now outdated. With liberals firmly in control of almost every power base in the culture — most importantly, the federal courts — there is no reason for liberals to play defense, he asserts. As he makes his case, he argues that liberal judges are now in the majority and that the Supreme Court , given the death of Justice Antonin Scalia , is unlikely to reverse any liberal decisions handed down by lower courts. Federal judges, T...