Rabelais, Bakhtin and the Zuni

I’m taking a break and highlighting some classic posts from my first full year of blogging, 2004. One of the biggest differences between my blogging then and my blogging now is in the proportion of prose to poetry, which was almost 180 degrees from what it is now. And I was so much more, um, opinionated back then! But I like to re-read posts like this one from time to time to remind myself of what I believe — or would believe, if I believed more strongly in the importance of belief. (Please click through to read the whole thing.)

Laughing in church:

Whether we flagellate ourselves like the Shi’a commemorating the death of Hussein or ogle the flagellation of Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, our sense of what it means to be compassionate is limited, really, to a single emotion: sorrow. But is it not in shared laughter that people feel most akin? If the goal of religion is, as it proclaims, to promote peace and unite humankind, why is laughter still barred from the churches, temples and mosques?

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