POSTPONED: Curses! Power, Justice and Cursing Among the Earliest Christians - Laura Nasrallah (Yale)

This event has been postponed until further notice.

It may surprise some that within the New Testament—the central scripture of Christianity—we find evidence of cursing. This lecture explores Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians and evidence of curse texts from Corinth to explicate ideas of judgment, justice, power, and destruction in the ancient world. It also uses evidence of recent ritual and art works—minkisi from the Kongo and a tradition of using nails by African American artists—to think more deeply about rituals in which power is accessed or released.

This event is part of the Ptarmigan Foundation Series on Early Christianity and the Ancient World. The Ptarmigan fund was established in 2014 to support academic programming dedicated to the study of religion during the period of Late Antiquity. That same year inaugurated the Ptarmigan Lecture Series to bring together scholars from within religious studies, as well as from related fields such as classics, philosophy, history, and art history, to share perspectives on religion, philosophy and culture during this formative period. Starting in 2019, there began a substantial expansion of supported activities that now include multi-day master classes, symposia, as well as language and manuscript workshops.