He’s dense and difficult, but give him a try, man if you haven’t.

“Protestants have never excelled at evoking the Carnivalesque. In one of the ironic twists of the Reformation, the Protestant desire to arrive at a “critical” understanding and implementation of tradition ended up closing off the Carnivalesque spaces in society.

Catholic culture on the other hand, with its ordering of life around the ritual of the Mass, is better situated to foster such spaces.”

AHA! Jackpot: that connects us back to the history of the modern state, stage performance and ritual in Catholic and Protestant countries, economics, politics, and so on.

Thanks!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivalesque

And, of course, such a topic just isn’t complete without reference to Rabelais’s Pantagruelism, Fr. Gassalasca Jape, S.J., a few others that I now can’t think of.

“Protestants have never excelled at evoking the Carnivalesque. In one of the ironic twists of the Reformation, the Protestant desire to arrive at a “critical” understanding and implementation of tradition ended up closing off the Carnivalesque spaces in society.

Catholic culture on the other hand, with its ordering of life around the ritual of the Mass, is better situated to foster such spaces.”

The perfect launching ground for further research is:

http://www.newpantagruel.com/pantagruelism.php

“Mikhail Bakhtin called this space the Carnivalesque … a space where, for a time at least, the disparate elements of culture and society are brought together and shorn of pretense. The King and the Peasant share the stage; they may trade places; for a while it may even be difficult to distinguish one from the other.

“It functions as a way to subvert ‘official’ culture and hold at arm’s length the worst abuses of society by fostering communal exposure to a shared and received tradition through which the commonwealth can recognize and reorient itself towards the spiritual order and transcendent ground which lies behind and above the mundane everyday orders of politics, power, religion, and money.

“I don’t think this evocation of the Carnivalesque is necessarily ‘Catholic,’ but I think I understand the transposition of the two because Protestants have never excelled at evoking the Carnivalesque.”

http://japery.newpantagruel.com/2004/0...nivalesque_not_just_for_catholics.php