Priggishness and Piety.

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Poetix is so clever he makes me just want to give up and enjoy the ride.

He's my very own Tony Blair.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
The late 90s was probably when the smallest number of people would have called themselves feminists. There was a feeling abroad that all that was over and done with now, unless you were really radically dissatisfied and probably impossible to please. In the early 2000s I was getting well into Andrea Dworkin, and most women I spoke to weren't having any of it - it was seen as this weirdly defunct (not to mention warped and horrible) worldview. Now Dworkin has a certain re-emerging cachet (for better and worse, I would say), and feminism has really been re-activated as a cause.

(I don't mean to associate feminism specifically with priggishness and piety - rather, I'm interested in the depoliticisation of that time)
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's that thing of chaos triggering a desire for control.

Hate to drag in my Poetry for Dummies stuff to every thread but this is presumably one reason behind Eliot (faced with a "heap of broken images") converting to become an orthodox Catholic.
 

luka

Well-known member
I think that is to do with the views laid down in those tradition essays. That you can be part of an unbroken tradition with a readymade symbolic structure and ritual practice. You don't need to be Blake ranting about Orc and Oothona and Urizen. It's there, shaped and smoothed by generations of human use.

That and his desire to completely integrate into the British establishment.
 

luka

Well-known member
If you read the foreword to David Jones 'the anathemata' you get the same thing. A poet desiring a universal symbolism. Jones converted to Catholicism proper,
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Anyone know the best book surveying the difference between Christian denominations/sects?

Seems important to know
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
In the UK it breaks down four major ways: Catholic, Anglican, Dissenting (Methodist / Baptist / United Reformed etc), Pentecostal (stereotypically, mostly black congregations).

Within Anglicanism, there's High Anglican which wants to be as close to Catholic as possible without actually having the Holy Father in Rome as head of the church, and Low Anglican which is more like the dissenting churches: low-ceremony, evangelical, centrally focussed on the drama of personal salvation. They aren't separate denominations, but tendencies within one denomination. Some churches are more High, some more Low, some manage an uneasy mixture. Choir for the Highs, worship group with guitars for the Lows.

I imagine there are internal distinctions within the other denominations too, but couldn't tell you what they were.
 

luka

Well-known member
My grandfather and grandmother ending up going to different Plymouth brethren churches after ending up on different sides of a schism concerning whether or not the altar should be covered with a cloth. To my grandmother this smacked of Catholic frivolity, luxury and decadence.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
My mum comes from a Catholic family but I've never been to a church service.

She loves the rituals of it.

Actually, though, while I recognise that Catholics have a lot of cool art/glitzy shit going on, most of the churches I went to in Rome were both astounding and unspeakably vulgar.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Catholicism has a lot of room in it for vulgarity. Catholic tat shops are amazing, full of the absolute wildest kitsch.
 

luka

Well-known member
Protestantism is the impulse behind modernist architecture too. My grandmother's outlook. What are the essentials of ritual and what is ornament.
 

luka

Well-known member
Also similar to what I was saying on the evolution thread the other day. To cut off or to linger.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Going Catholic used to be one of the approved ways you could go off the rails as a left-wing intellectual. Liberation Theology as the gateway drug to some sort of pastoral localism. A fairly honourable defeat.
 

luka

Well-known member
Tell us about the trad cath twitter movement. What's going on there? Moldbug inspired backwards looking jingoism? Our glorious western inheritance?
 
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