Over at Rod Dreher's Diary, my subscriber-only Substack newsletter, I published a two-part interview that I did recently with the writer Paul Kingsnorth. I visited him in Ireland, where he lives in the County Galway countryside with his wife and kids, to interview him for my forthcoming book about re-enchantment. That's us above, in the ruins of a medieval abbey. Paul, a convert to Orthodox Christianity, writes the much-discussed Substack newsletter The Abbey of Misrule, and is emerging as one of the most important cultural critics of our time.

Because Substack limits the space you have in each newsletter, I had to break the interview into two parts. Part I is here, below the photo of Paul and me in a pub in the rural west of Ireland:

ROD DREHER: Why did you move to rural Ireland?

PAUL KINGSNORTH: It was 2014 when we moved here. My wife and I had a vision of how we wanted to live. We wanted some land, we wanted to garden, we wanted to homeschool our children (we knew that even before we had children). That was our idea of the good life. My wife was a psychiatrist, but she was becoming very disillusioned with that. We thought we would try to jump. She would leave her job, and I would try to support our family through my writing. So we looked for somewhere to live, just a couple of acres and a small house. You can’t afford it in England. We looked at Scotland and Wales. We wanted to live close enough to go back to see family, and we liked Ireland, so we decided to give it a go. That was nearly ten years ago.

Living in the country did not come naturally to me. I come from a very urban family. My London family goes back generations. So we came here and had to learn a lot of skills. Had to learn how to grow food. Had to learn how to plant trees. Had to learn how to build outbuildings. How to keep animals. So there are a lot of practical skills, but mostly it’s about learning how to live in a different way: out in the country, able to see the stars at night, your children at home all the time. The home becomes a kind of economy, in the Wendell Berry sense. You’re trying to create a place that is not just a dormitory you come to when you’re not at work, but is rather at the center of things.

If I were to look back on it, I would say there’s something I was brought here to do, in a mystical, spiritual sense. The things I’m learning about the early Irish saints, the way religion here is connected to the landscape – there’s still more of a living folk and mystical tradition here than in England, though it’s certainly dying out. And the fact that I became a Christian here, which I certainly didn’t intend or expect to do. I don’t think any of that would have happened in England, simply because of the way I was living. I think I had to come here to learn something.

How did living in rural Ireland prepare you to receive the things you were meant to learn?

My connection to God comes through nature, fundamentally. I’ve had from a very early age this sense that it’s alive, and we’re connected to it, and that we live in a society that denies this, and is destroying it. It’s a spiritual tragedy as well as a cultural tragedy. What we’re doing in the modern world is so destructive to nature, as well as to our culture and our souls. It’s all the same thing, really. I’ve always had that, and have been on a spiritual quest for a long time.

When I turned forty, I decided that I was going to formalize the spiritual quest, so I went on a Buddhist retreat. That was very effective. That pushed me into Zen Buddhism for five or six or seven years. Then I went through a neopagan period, with my immersion in Wicca because I was looking for a nature religion. And then I ended up a Christian.

It seems to me that the quest for a different kind of life, and the quest for a spiritual path, are connected to each other. It feels like the attempt to get closer to nature and to live in a different way has opened me up to things I wouldn’t have been opened up to in another way. And of course I just happened to be living close to the first Orthodox monastery to open in Ireland in a thousand years.

What is it about Orthodoxy that spoke to you, especially your love of Nature?

Like a lot of Western people, I grew up with the post-Enlightenment myth that Christianity is a dead religion, and an oppressive monstrosity. Which is a myth that exists for a reason, given the things the Church has done in some parts of its history. When I was growing up, Christianity just looked irrelevant. So when I went looking for ‘spirituality,’ I didn’t go to the Church, because why would you?

I had bought into the myth that Christianity said humans are superior to everything else, and that everything else is basically just stuff that we’re supposed to dominate, and that God’s up in the sky. That didn’t speak to me at all, and given that I come from a Protestant country, that’s pretty much the view, if not the formal view. That’s the impression you get. You get the feeling that you put your faith in a man who died and might have risen 2,000 years ago, you go to church on Sunday, and it all gets sorted – that doesn’t have any meaning or relevance to me.

It’s about sorting the ideas in your head.

Yes, it’s very rational, but it’s also disconnected. We have a political crisis and a technological crisis today, but what’s at the root of it is a loss of connection to the earth. Young people want that, and so they’ll go off to become activists, or maybe get into neopaganism. What they really need, I would say looking back, is a spiritual path that connects them to the earth, which is a legitimate thing. You’re not going to get that in the Church of England. But you do get it in the Orthodox faith, interestingly. It’s not earth-worshiping, but it fills in what’s lacking in Western Christianity: the mysticism.

The Reformation, particularly in England, was enormously destructive. I went to visit Romania recently, and saw a land where, even though its modernizing rapidly, still had lots of monasteries, and wayside shrines. You still had the sense that there’s a rooted, mystical Christian faith there. There is a feeling, which I find throughout the Orthodox path, that the right brain and not the left brain is dominant. That would have been the case in England before the Reformation. Monasteries, huge painted churches, shrines, holy wells – all of it was destroyed. They took out the monastics, who are the mystical force of Christianity, and they took out the Virgin Mary, who is the feminine force. They took out the connection to place – the holy wells and the shrines and the rest of it. So we ended up with a highly masculine Christianity which always tends towards theological abstraction. You can’t talk much about Mary anymore, so you kill off the feminine aspect of the divine. You can’t have monks, who are the mystics praying for you and your country and the world; and you kill off all the small local things, like the wells and the trees and the shrines, that connect the God above to the earth. All you’re left with is a very rational, very intellectual, very masculine idea of God.

As a result the whole the thing starts to wither, and that’s what’s happened in England and the Protestant countries. Not that I want to be attacking Protestants, or making a sectarian point,  but there’s something deeply lacking in Western Christianity, and I have found that it’s not lacking in Orthodoxy.

The monastic tradition is still there. The Jesus Prayer can connect you to God. The purpose of that is theosis, union with God. Orthodoxy tells you that you can achieve that. There’s a sense of panentheism: that the earth is alive, and that God is ‘everywhere present and filling all things,’ as it says in the prayer. The earth is not God, but God is there, present in Nature, not in some far-off heaven. He’s deeply entwined in everything. Creation is the book of God, as Augustine said, I think. That is explicitly recognized in Orthodoxy. So what I was finding, weirdly enough, was a sort of ancestral Christianity that my ancestors in England would have had access to, and that the early Celtic saints certainly had access to. When I became Orthodox, a lot of people said to me, ‘welcome home,’ and strangely, it did feel like I was coming home. It felt like there’s something here that we had, that we lost.

What I’m talking about here is very old: it’s the heart of the faith. It’s not a modern bit of syncretic Christianity, whacking in a bit of neo-paganism to make it feel ‘inclusive’, or something. This has been there from the beginning. This is the faith of the Desert Fathers. It’s not earth-worshiping, but it is definitely acknowledging the mystery of Creation, and the different levels of reality that exist, and it shows you the connection you can have with the natural world. So you look at the stories and journals of the old Celtic saints, and the poems they wrote in Ireland and Britain, and realize they had a deep connection to the natural world, whilst also realizing that they’re trying to go through it.

I can see Nature, and I can see Creation, the same way I can see an icon. We don’t worship the icons, we venerate the icons, because through the icons we can see the thing they represent. So when you stand in front of an icon of St. Porphyrios, it’s just paint and wood. You’re not worshiping it, like a Golden Calf. But through it, you are connecting yourself to him. He really exists. You can do the same with Christ, you can do the same with Mary. Our connection to it can take us through to the thing that we’re seeing.

We can see nature in the same way. We can walk into a forest, we can venerate the forest, and through the forest we can see God, or so it seems to me. We go ‘through Creation to the Creator’ – that’s a phrase that Metropolitan Kallistos Ware used. God is a great artist, and Creation is his work. We learn about the artist through what he has made. So if you’re plundering and cutting and burning your way through the earth because you believe you were told that that’s what it means to have dominion over the earth, then that’s blasphemy, that’s sacrilege.

I’ve learned in my research that the greater our control over the natural world and our own lives – which is the goal of modernity – the less mysterious and enchanted the world is to us. It is not an accident that as our technological capabilities have reached an apex, we in the West are mired in a profound spiritual crisis.

I think so. The interesting thing is that the cutting edge of science today is what’s demonstrating the falseness of that scientistic notion of nature as a dead thing. The more you understand about how the natural world works, the less you can think of it as a disconnected set of resources you can just hack down. A forest is a being in itself. Trees are communicating with each other, they’re communicating with the fungi underneath, they’re communicating with the animals. There’s a symbiotic relationship. The whole place is alive. Every indigenous culture has always known this.

… It’s our spiritual relationship to Nature that’s broken. We do not treat life, Creation, the gift we are given to be stewards of, as something to love and respect and tend – and harvest, because obviously we have to eat, we have to kill the animals, that’s fine, that’s where we are. But we don’t treat it like that. We treat it like a dead ‘resource’, and now that’s all coming back to bite us.

Hearing you talk brings to mind contemporary Christians who want to cobble together a bricolage religion: a little bit of this “ancient Celtic” spirituality, a little bit of that from the Russian Orthodox tradition, and so forth. It doesn’t really work because you can’t escape the fact that you’ve constructed this. Orthodoxy is different. It’s a living tradition that we didn’t build, but received. Right, it wasn’t handed down from heaven completely formed, but it was made in its current form many, many centuries ago. I think it becomes easier to form ourselves around it, and allow it to shape who we become, because we didn’t begin by encompassing it with our own sensibility, dissected it, and instrumentalized it to make it “work” for us.

Orthodoxy is tried and tested. You can read the lives of the saints from the Desert Fathers onward, and they’ve put it into practice, and you can see that it works. So if you follow the Orthodox path, you can become a saint. It’s a real tradition. That’s not to say that nothing at all has ever changed: it has, of course, over 2000 years. But the fundamental heart of the thing is very old, and it works to do what it’s designed to do: to allow us to follow the teachings of Christ to take us to God.

The modern syncretic approach, especially in the Christian churches in the West, occurs because the modern Western churches have thrown out what Orthodoxy still has. I think of Thomas Merton. He becomes a Catholic, but spends a long time itching for mysticism and contemplation, which he can’t find in his church. So he ends up dabbling in Hinduism and Zen. Interestingly, he never seems to think about Orthodoxy, where what he is looking for can still be found in the ancient Christian church. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m not aware of looking into the Eastern Christian tradition. Richard Rohr, who is one of Merton’s spiritual children I believe, is another one of these people who take bits and pieces of other faiths and try to cram them into the Christian pattern. It’s understandable that this happens, in a way, because that of what is missing fromWestern Christianity . If you want the mysticism, the connection to Nature, you can’t find it in Anglicanism, and I don’t think you can find it in Catholicism either. But you can find it in the Orthodox tradition.

I first thought that you might one day become Orthodox back in 2014, when I read your essay “In The Black Chamber,” which is about a visit you made with your family to a prehistoric cave in the Pyrenees, to look at cave paintings. Tell me, what did you feel when you were in that cave?

That was very formative to me, that experience. If you want to see how ancient enchantment is, go there. There are cave paintings that are 30,000 years old at least. A lot of the things we once believed about these paintings aren’t true. For example, you might think that because the people of that period were hunters, that they were painting their prey: that was once a common notion. In fact, none of the animals depicted on the walls were hunted. What you’ve got is these huge caves with animals painted beautifully, all over. The lines are simple, but what you see when you move candlelight over them is that the animals seem to move, like they’re running. The interesting thing about some of them is to get to the cavern, you have to crawl down a very, very small corridor. Some of these paintings are painted in tiny crevices, upside down, where only one person can see them at a time. It’s not  some kind of art gallery. Something ritualized is going on. It’s not a practical thing, and I don’t think it’s ‘art’ in the modern sense either.

I had a deep sense of religious awe when I was in those caves. I didn’t expect that at all. The place I was in, the salon noir, the black chamber, felt like being inside a domed church, or a mosque, or temple. It just felt like 30,000 years ago, this deep, connective religious experience was going on in here, involving the animals outside. What was the cave? Was it the womb of the earth? We have no idea what these people’s worldview was. But you could feel that there was something in there beyond, “Let’s just paint some nice pictures on the wall.”

I spent many years on a search for spiritual truth, because I had a strong sense of God, or the divine, or something. I didn’t know what it was. I felt it in Nature especially, but I didn’t know what it was. So when I went to the Pyrenees caves, I had a strong feeling that these people knew something, 30,000 years ago. There was some connection: as if we were on the same path.

The myth of progress is so powerful with us. The idea that people 30,000 years ago might have known something that we don’t is a very hard thing for modern people to get their minds around.

I think so. It has always seemed obvious to me that we have lost a lot in terms of our connection to the natural world, and the spirituality that comes out of that. To some degree that’s a sensibility. It’s difficult to explain. Many traditional cultures have it, still preserve it. We might think, “Oh, that’s nice, we’d better protect them.” But we don’t imagine that it’s something that applies to us, or that we could access. Even though we’re politically correct about it, we still patronizingly think of them as backwards. We’re basically still liberal imperialists in the West. We think we’re the best. We think we have the smarts.

So, okay, they may not be as technologically advanced as we are, but they’ve still got an understanding of the religious dimension of life that we have lost in our quest for wealth and ‘development.’ I’ve seen this with my own eyes, and there’s no need to ‘romanticize’ non-Western cultures to acknowledge what we have lost and laid asideThe conclusion I’ve come to is that all society is essentially religious. We’re the first culture on any scale to try to live without religion, and it’s not working out very well. I think it’s impossible not to have religion, not to have a ritual center.

Your writing comes across as apocalyptic.

I’m afraid so.

What is the nature of the apocalypse we’re in now?

What’s an apocalypse? An apocalypse is a revelation, an unveiling. So, what’s being unveiled? That’s the question. What’s being unveiled, I think now, is that we can’t live without God. We can’t live without religion. We can’t live without connection to the rest of life, which is the thing we call Nature. I’m not keen on  this word “Nature,” because it suggests something external to us, whereas in fact we’re part of it. If you don’t think you’re part of nature, try holding your breath for five minutes! But we have this idea now that we exist apart from it, and that we can completely rebuild it in our own image – that’s the curse.

One of the things I find so exciting about Christianity is the Genesis story. I can’t help going back to Genesis and seeking the nature of the problem. That’s where we see the essence of the thing: we were put here to tend the garden, but instead we decided to try to become gods. Our will was to be done, not His. And we’re still doing it. Where that leads – and this is what the revelation is, and it’s happening very fast now – is to use our technology to attempt to build new life forms, which is what we’re doing now with artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, through the denial of the existence of the body. You can bring the gender argument in around that also: people denying that a man and a woman are physical realities, and are rather a kind of internal feeling. ‘Fixing’ our bodies with technology. It’s all connected.

We have moved to a point where we have extremely advanced technology, but we’re essentially using it to do the same thing we tried to do when we were persuaded to eat the apple in the Garden of Eden. We want to live forever.We want to be gods.  We are trying to build artificial intelligences and robots to replace us, we want to manage the whole of the natural world, we want to genetically modify the food we eat, artificial wombs are on the horizon. There was that news the other day about corpses being used to gestate babies – I couldn’t even believe that was real. But that’s where we are. Euthanasia is on the agenda, and growing in popularity, if that’s the right word. The world is a utility. And if you see yourself as a god, then you have permission to rebuild the whole world. Why not, if nothing is sacred, and there’s nothing beyond us, just a mass of atoms, and we’re all going to die?

I’ve had conversations with transhumanists who have said directly to me, “We need to create a world of justice and equality, where death is abolished.” This is what they believe in. They want to create heaven, but they’re God this time.

That’s what the Bolsheviks tried to do.

Yes, but their utopia came out of Marxism, which had a specific ideological foundation. This is a different kind of utopianism, which combines advanced technology with progressive ideology with global capitalism.  The common factor is the desire to control nature and rebuild the world from the ground up.

The idea of creating heaven on earth is an appealing vision, you see. It seems to me that at the heart of a religious vision is an acceptance of suffering. That’s true of every religion I know. You have to accept suffering, and suffering has has something to teach you. That there is a world beyond this life. There’s something more important than this life. That the way to live in this world is to detach yourself from it as much as you can, to live simply, to love your neighbor. That’s  Christianity, and you’ll find those teachings in many other religions as well. But that’s a hard sell. We don’t like it. We don’t want to do it. It’s not as easy a sell as consumerism, and living forever, and abolishing all suffering through modern medicine, being able to go to the other side of the world on holiday without thinking. Everybody likes doing these things. Telling them that’s not the way forward, that the way forward is some form of privation and religious struggle, is not going to be appealing to most people, and probably never has been. [laughs]

To give a small example: I don’t have a smartphone and won’t have one. I’m hardly an ascetic, but it’s a fact that simply not having things like this – things which most people take for granted - changes your perspective, in the same way that fasting for forty days changes your perspective on food, and your relationship to food, and the physical world. But you have to do it to realize that. It’s not something you can sell to most people, certainly not as some kind of social or political solution to our problems. And that’s why technology is so appealing. It feels like a get-out clause. We don’t have to change. “How can we make the technology sustainable?” That’s the only argument we seem to be able to have at this point.

Tell me about The Machine.

It’s a way of representing the technological society that’s manifesting around us. It’s an idea that emerges in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that we now live amongst  such a superstructure of technology that we don’t have control of our lives anymore. That it’s much bigger than us. We are cogs in a Machine. Life is not primarily organic now, it’s technological. And we live entirely controlled by that. Find me a place in this country where there’s not a smartphone in the room, where there’s not a computer terminal in the room, where there’s not a TV screen in the room. We’re moving into a world in which technological monitoring and control of the population is becoming completely normalized. There’s always a good reason for it. It’s always about sustainability, or keeping people safe from Covid, or managing equality, or consumer convenience.

The Machine is a grid of technology that’s created and controlled by surprisingly few people, that envelops the rest of us, is sold to us as convenience. But it’s a trap. It’s very difficult not to have a phone these days, even if you don’t want one. It’s impossible not to have an online bank account. It’s impossible not to use technologies that gather information on you when you get on the Internet. Something’s being constructed around us, which is ultimately going to lead to a technological dystopia. Of course, it’s intended to be a utopia. Technology is the means by which we think we can achieve that desire to become gods. What does a god do? A god creates. We can recreate life itself with technology. But now we find ourselves in a technological system that is now moving so fast that it feels out of control. You don’t even know what’s going on. How often are you being monitored? What do the machines know about you, the corporations and the government know about you?

What is social media, for example? It’s a system in which you offer all your political opinions, all your beliefs, all your likes, all your family photos, everything about your life, free, to enormous corporations that we know very well are cooperating with the government to monitor our behavior, and are using all of this information to construct complex algorithms which will ultimately replace human workers. We’re surrendering this information, and for what? For a sense of connection, perhaps, and for videos of cats falling off logs, and the rest of it. If an agent of the state demanded that of you, there’d be a riot. But we just hand it over to these companies. What confidence do you have that a social credit-style system will not emerge from this? I think we can already clearly see it happening.

We’re not disenchanted these days – we’re just enchanted by the wrong thing. And the thing we’re enchanted by is technology. If you’re enchanted by technology, you’re enchanted by yourself, because we’re the ones who created technology. If you’re enchanted by an ancient rain forest, then you’re enchanted by something outside of yourself, that was created by God, or even if you don’t believe in God, it’s naturally occurring. You stand in awe of it. That’s not the same as being enchanted by a computer that’s been created by a human, by a human mind.

We’re enchanted by phones. How many hours a day do we spend on them? We’re uninterested in confronting the direction that this is leading us in. We’re wrapped up in it. It’s just like a drug. People can’t take their eyes off of it. It’s doing what it’s designed to do. You’re being sold a story that this is your personal fulfillment, if you just give yourself over to it.

It’s like being elf-shot. I don’t know if you’ve come across that phrase. So the elves, in Anglo-Saxon mythology, would fire arrows into you. So if you were elf-shot, you would kind of lose your mind, you would lose your memory. They would find you wandering in the woods, and take you home. You would spend days recovering, if you ever recovered. When you’re elf-shot, something has been fired into your body by the elves that makes you lose part of yourself, your sense of self and place. That’s what living with the smartphone is like: being elf-shot.

So if that’s false enchantment, what would it be like to live in true enchantment, from a Christian point of view?

It’s a love of God and love of Creation. Instead of becoming enchanted by what you’ve created, you become enchanted by what already exists. You become enchanted by Nature. You become enchanted by the Creator of Nature. You become enchanted by the liturgy, by storytelling. You become enchanted by something you can never fully understand. Enchantment comes from mystery. You have to have mystery – mystery and beauty. Enchantment is putting yourself in right relation to mystery.

What you can’t do is enchant yourself with your own technological creation. That’s closer to demonic enchantment. It’s a darker thing. I keep coming back to the Eden story. What is the snake? What is Lucifer? He’s deeply in love with himself. He wonders why he should do what God wants, and why he can’t do it himself. That’s an attractive message, in a way, especially to the young: why the hell should I have to do what you tell me? That question is the basis of modern Western culture. We’ve all been there. And if technology is what gives you the power to live that out, what are you going to do? You can’t argue against it.

One great tragedy of our time is the gender dysphoric. Everybody goes through anxiety when they hit puberty, because it feels like your body is out of control. But now, this generation has an ideology that gives them a story to understand it, and a way to deal with their anxiety through chemicals and surgery.

We’ve found ourselves in the midst of a society which increasingly endorses technological intervention to correct adolescence. I just feel sorry for almost everyone involved. Some of the most tragic stories are of children who transitioned and then regretted it. I think it’s probably true that most of the people who push this are well intentioned; though we’re also dealing with some dangerous ideologues at the heart of the thing. But once you’ve got to the point where you tell a teenager they should cut their breasts off, they should cut their genitals off, they should take these hormone pills that prevent puberty, and that this is a medical treatment – that their bodies are a problem to be solved with technology - you need to stop and say, What’s going on here? Is this right? Can this be right, surgical interventions like this on children? To me, it’s a huge alarm bell, a sign that something is wrong at a very deep level. But it’s almost impossible to discuss it without being set upon as a ‘hater’.

To question it is ultimately to question the Sexual Revolution, at the heart of which is this idea that your desires are at the core of your identity. It’s the most offensive thing for modern people to hear, the idea that there are natural limits, and that there are things we have to submit to. Michael Hanby says that the Sexual Revolution is just the extension of the Scientific and Technological Revolution to the human body.

It’s a spectrum, of course, because we’ve been doing that forever in one sense. That’s what dentistry and spectacles and   antibiotics do. Mary Harrington wrote recently about how this began most radically with with the contraceptive pill – which of course is many decades ago now. The question is, where does it stop? Is there a place where a line can be drawn? Gender ideology, which tells you that you should use technology to transform your body into what you think you really are, is not just something that’s popped up out of nowhere. It’s had a long political incubation on the postmodern left, but there’s also a long cultural history of this, with medicine, with modern technology and with our cultural relationship to it. We’re trying to remake ourselves. It comes back to being gods again. It’s a very ancient desire.

See, that’s the first thing everybody says when you bring up the idea that people in the distant past knew important things that we don’t, and that we should think about that. They’ll say, “What, you want us to return to pre-modern dentistry?”

They’re obsessed with dentistry. [laughs]

Well, it’s a false dichotomy: that you can either have enchantment, or modern dentistry. You and I are both believing Christians, and we both go to the dentist. I don’t see a contradiction between getting an injection so I can bear the pain of a filling, and believing in God.

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No, there isn’t one as such. The question with technology is where you apply the brakes. The conclusion I’ve come to is that you can’t apply the brakes, because there’s never a point when you say, ‘okay, we’ve gone far enough now, and if we go over this line, it would be too dangerous.’ I don’t know of a case in history where that has ever happened at scale. Western society as a whole is certainly not going to do that. The only way you’re going to do it is like the Amish way, where you form a very thick small community that’s bound together by religion, and say, “Here’s what we’re going to do, and what we’re not going to do.” And even then there are conflicts.

I don’t think we’re going to stop experimenting with this path towards technological utopia. It’s who we are now. We didn’t stop with creating bombs that can destroy the entire world. We’re not going to stop with artificial intelligence. If we can do it, we are going to do it. And even things a few years ago that seemed taboo – eugenics is the obvious one – are becoming normalized. Eugenics were  popular a century ago, especially amongst intellectuals, until  the Nazis came along to to show us how terrible eugenics could be, and it became completely taboo, quite rightly. But it’s on the way back. Childless couples can already choose surrogate mothers from a catalogue and purchase their eggs from the other side of the world. What’s to stop us choosing the qualities of our future children?The ethical argument against that doesn’t stand up, unless you have religious belief.  A society that believes there’s always a technological solution to a non-technological problem will always go for it. If you can gestate a child in the living corpse of a brain-dead woman, and give that baby to a woman who suffers from not having a child, well, who are you to say that that’s wrong? Try answering that question.

[End of Part I. If you want to read Part II, subscribe to Rod Dreher's Diary. It's only five dollars per month, which, once I start doing all my blog writing there in two weeks, after this blog sleeps with the fishes, is going to amount to only twenty cents per day. I hope you'll sign up for more content like this. I see that in the past 90 minutes I've gotten a lot of folks signing up for the free version of the newsletter. Not too many of them come out, I'm afraid. Man's gotta eat. Man's gotta pay the divorce lawyer, and the child support. Man's gotta pay the vet bill for the dear, suffering old dog he had to have put down, and for the bottle of whisky he had to drink to deal with that horrible event. Etc.]