Hello, everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind, and make you brave.

I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode. Hello everybody and welcome back to

Speaking with Joy. This is the last episode in my series of interviews that I've been posting that are

loosely related to the themes in my book, aggressively happy, a realist guide to believing in the

goodness of life. This week, we're exploring the theme of expecting the end of the world.

I was really excited about this interview in particular, which I recorded when other things

felt like the end of the world, when now we have the crisis in Ukraine hanging over our heads.

But I still found so much of the interview applicable to how we're feeling and what we're

thinking now.

But I was really excited about this particular

interview because I was totally electrified by the writing that I first discovered by this author.

So the interview is with Paul Kings North, and the first place I encountered him was in an essay

and First Things called The Cross and the Machine, which was an essay-length account of his journey to Orthodox Christianity, as he puts it, via Buddhism, witchcraft, and other strange twists.

Kings North is perhaps best known as being the co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project, which was a writing collective

that was kind of oriented around the idea of eco-pessimism, which was the idea that we really

have kind of destroyed the world beyond, destroyed the natural world beyond a state of repair,

and so how do we live in light of that? So you can see why I might

have picked him, picked this particular interview for this week's chapter. But Paul has done many

things. He is a poet. He wrote a novel almost entirely in old, I think it's old English, old

middle English. And more recently, he has had his kind of radical views,

radicalized in new ways by his conversion to Christianity,

...