Lectures on Tap-"Pentecostal Snake Handling & Ecological Relationality"

📍 Location: Exact address given in confirmation email

🧠 Lecture: "Pentecostal Snake Handling & Ecological Relationality"

🎤 Speaker: Blake Avris Long

Join us for a provocative evening as Blake Avris Long explores Pentecostal serpent handling as a way to rethink how humans relate to the more-than-human world. Moving beyond sensationalized portrayals, this lecture treats serpent handling as an imaginative space where vulnerability, risk, and interspecies relationality reshape what counts as knowledge.

Drawing on early Appalachian Holiness-Pentecostal practice and theology, Long asks which spaces are considered “safe” for producing knowledge in the academy—and who gets excluded. By centering Pentecostal communities often coded as queer, socially deviant, and dangerous, he shows how marginalized religious practices unsettle assumptions about where legitimate knowledge can emerge.

Blake Long is a former non-profit leader and a second-year graduate student at Yale University. His research focuses on intersections of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity with queer studies, illuminating how marginalized religious experiences generate new forms of meaning-making. He is passionate about storytelling from the margins and the power of theological imagination in shaping public life and culture.

Get a drink, connect, and learn at Lectures on Tap! 🙌

Agenda

6:30 PM – Doors open: find a seat (open seating!), order food & drinks, and expect a bar line—arriving early is key.

6:55 PM – Host introduction

7:00 PM – Lecture begins

7:45 PM – Audience Q&A

8:00 PM – Have 1:1 time with the speaker, mingle with fellow guests, and order another round

8:30 PM – Wrap up.

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