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Playwright, journalist, and podcaster Ngofeen Mputubwele is writing a play about a deceptively simple question: when did white people stop dancing? What began as a conversation about medieval bodies quickly became something much large: a history of how Western Christianity came to distrust its own flesh, and how that distrust got exported around the world.

In this first conversation, Ngofeen and I trace the origins of the Western church's conflicted relationship with the body: the fall of Rome as a civilizational 9/11, Augustine's personal war with his own desire becoming the theological architecture of an entire tradition, and the earthy, embodied fusion of Augustinian theology with the "indigenous" place-based spirituality of ancient Europe that gave medieval Christianity its sensory richness (the relics, pilgrimage, a whole cabinet full of ways to do something with your shame)

Then the Reformation arrives and strips it all bare. What's left when you take away the rituals? You turn inward, which has huge implications for the body.