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

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.