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Let’s Talk About: The Disastrous 1300s

What happens to a civilization's relationship with the body when a third of it perishes in a few short years? In part two of my ongoing conversation with journalist, playwright, and opera singer Ngofeen Mputubwele, we enter the catastrophic 1300s: the Avignon Papacy, the Western Schism, and - of course - the Black Plague. I argue that the plague marks one of the great unacknowledged turning points in church history: the moment Western Christianity's understanding of suffering shifted from purgative (cleansing, reparative) to punitive (the raw rage of God poured out on human flesh). Along the way, Ngofeen brings his remarkable personal stew - Congolese Catholicism, the historic Black church, white Reformed evangelicalism, opera, and ballet - to bear on Western Christianity’s suspicion of emotion, movement, and the body itself. We talk Carnival, Calvin's Geneva, the Danse Macabre, rotting tomb sculptures, La Traviata, Hillsong-era worship anxieties, and why there would have been no Reformation without the Plague.

Topics discussed in this episode:

• What’s the West’s deal with emotion? How a high school music course planted a new question
• Amazing Grace in white church vs. Black church, and Hillsong-era suspicion of embodied worship
• Calvin's Geneva: the theocratic city-state that explicitly outlawed dancing
• How the Carnival festival survived: preserved by Black communities in the colonized Americas but not by Europeans
• Ngofeen's family history: a Jesuit mission in Congo, Gregorian chant and rumba in one household, and the discovery that "the rules of the body are not universal"
•  Emotion as “movement outward”: why cultures of correct doctrine fear what arises without consent
• The medieval church as a sin-management system and why Hell felt farther away for a medieval peasant than for a Protestant
• Carnival, inversion, and mockery: what the church tolerated and why
• The traumatic 1300s: the Avignon Papacy, three rival popes, the Black Plague and Catherine of Siena's prophetic confrontation
• The Black Death as theological rupture: from purgative suffering to divine punishment
• Why there would have been no Reformation without the Plague
• The Danse Macabre: the dance with Death that no one - rich, poor, or pope - could refuse
• Death dances in opera: La Traviata, Carmen, and the "fallen woman" who must die
• Rotting bodies on tombs: the transi and the post-plague obsession with mortality, wounds, and blood
•  Ebola, Mpox, COVID, and the modern imagination of "bad death"

Questions or Comments? 

•  Follow Freestyle Theology on Instagram: @freestyletheology
•  Send me a message directly through the podcast: tap the link at the top of the episode description
• Have a question or topic you want us to take up in a future episode? Message me and let me know!
• New to the series? Go back and listen to Part 1: "Let’s Talk About: The Medieval Body"