Curse: Ancient Mediterranean Ritual, Our Present Moment, and the Search for Justice

Inspired by contemporary injustices and justice-seeking in The United States, this talk takes the ancient mediterranean world as a laboratory in which to discover mechanisms for enacting justice. When ancient ritual practices of legal cursing are set alongside ancient Christian demands for justice from the Roman imperial family, we begin to see cross-religious strategies for seeking right action with the aifd of himan and non-human actors, and an imagination for justice both promising and cautionary for our own movement.