Lectures on Tap - "Pentecostal Snake Handling as Ecology"

📍 Location: Exact address given in confirmation email

🧠 Lecture: "Pentecostal Snake Handling as Ecology"

🎙️ Speaker: Graduate Researcher, Blake Long

Join us for a captivating evening as Blake Long invites us into the world of Pentecostal serpent handling to rethink how humans, animals, and environments relate to one another. Moving beyond sensationalized portrayals, this lecture explores early Appalachian Holiness-Pentecostal practices as an imaginative space for considering vulnerability, risk, and interspecies relationality.

By asking what kinds of spaces are considered “safe” for producing knowledge in the academy, Blake examines how Pentecostal communities—often coded as queer, socially deviant, and dangerous—challenge conventional assumptions about where legitimate knowledge can emerge and who is authorized to produce it.

Blake Long is a former non-profit leader and a second-year graduate student at Yale University. His research focuses on the intersections of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity with queer studies, highlighting how marginalized religious experiences generate new forms of meaning-making. He is especially committed to storytelling from the margins and to exploring how theological imagination shapes 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.