Welcome to The Kingswood
“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
― Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition
Things are not as they should be.
We feel it in our bones.
Trust in institutions is crumbling. Loneliness is rising. Screens are ubiquitous. But the problem isn’t just “out there.” It’s “in here,” too—our hearts, relationships, and families. We feel disconnected, fragmented, hurried, discontent, and numb.
For years, I have been hounded by the persistent feeling that a different way of life is available to us, a life that actually leads to human flourishing. I call it:
The Life We Long For.
Instead of isolation and expressive individualism, this life is marked by radical hospitality and deep intimacy—with God, others, and creation itself.
Instead of endless scrolling and cycles of entertainment that leave us feeling empty, this life is marked by beauty, books, poetry, art, literature, walking, writing, painting, and other analog pursuits.
Instead of materialism and consumerism, this life is marked by simplicity and generosity.
Instead of cynicism or despair, it’s marked by wonder, enchantment, and wholeheartedness.
Most of all, it’s marked by a way of life that’s in tune with how we were created, as human beings made in the image of God; human beings who are, as Andy Crouch puts it (drawing on the Shema), “heart-mind-soul-strength complexes.”
But we’ve forgotten who we are and what we were made for. Instead, we’ve been lured into a shadow of the life we long for. Crouch again:
“Once, we lived with allness of heart, with a boldness of quest that was too in love with the good to call off the pursuit when we encountered risk. Now we live as voyeurs, pursuing shadowy vestiges of what we desire from behind the one-way mirror of a screen, invulnerable but alone.
For if human flourishing requires us to love with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strength, what happens when nothing in our lives develops those capacities? With what, exactly, will we love?”
-Andy Crouch, The Life We’re Looking For
The Kingswood is a gathering place for those harried souls looking for a better, ancient path towards ‘the Good Life.’ For those longing to develop their capacities to love with all their hearts, souls, minds, and strength.
Along this path, we will have many guides and sages: St. Augustine, Wendell Berry, J.R.R. Tolkien, the Desert Mothers and Fathers, Charles Dickens, C.S. Lewis, Mako Fujimura, Annie Dillard, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Paul Kingsnorth, Emily Dickens, Henri Nouwen, Malcolm Guite, Flannery O’Connor, W.B. Yeats, George Macdonald, G.K. Chesterton, and many others.
Together, we will plumb the depths of great works of art—from Jane Austen’s novels to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry to Rembrandt’s paintings to Terrance Mallick’s films—for clues and waypoints along the path toward this life we long for.
I hope you’ll join us on the journey.
Why the name, The Kingswood?
“He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.”
-C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature
Throughout literature, poetry, and art, the forest has often represented a place of transformation1. A place of wildness, beauty, danger, mystery, adventure, and enchantment. This image—of a wild, enchanted forest where one is as likely to be hunted by wolves as transfigured by a grizzled wizard—captures (I hope) the spirit of what The Kingswood aims to be.
Why subscribe to The Kingswood?
The Kingswood runs (currently) on a patronage model. The vast majority of what is published will arrive in your inbox if you sign up for the free emails. If you value the work, I encourage you to consider a paid subscription. In doing so you will be supporting me and my work, no small thing in these times.
A yearly subscription for $80 amounts to $6.66 per month. You also have the option to subscribe on a monthly basis at $8 per month. And should you find it in your heart to be more generous than that, you can subscribe as a Founding Member at a higher rate of your choosing.
P.S. Everything you read here on The Kingswood will be from a real human scribbling wildly or tapping furiously at his desk in Georgia. This is an AI-free publication.
Think of Bilbo in Mirkwood, Frodo in Lothlórien, Dante in the Dark Wood, Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest, or King Arthur in Broceliande.
