Lectures on Tap - "Religious Appalachia: Faith, Fangs, and Fire"

Join us for an engaging evening where professors, experts, and storytellers bring their thought-provoking lectures to your favorite bar in River North, Chicago!

Hosted by the Lectures on Tap team.

🗓️ Date: August 18th, 2025

🕡 Time: 6:30 PM

📍 Location: River North, Chicago (exact address provided in confirmation email)

📚 Lecture: “Religious Appalachia: Faith, Fangs, and Fire”

🎤 Speaker: Grad Student, Chase Viscuse

In this captivating talk, Chase Viscuse explores the high-stakes world of serpent-handling churches in Appalachia. Here, believers incorporate venomous snakes, fire, and poison into worship as powerful acts of ritual. We will examine how risk transforms into the sacred, how communities derive meaning from danger and death, and what these churches reveal about religious experience, embodied faith, and belief in action.

Whether you're fascinated or skeptical, this deep dive into a unique tradition challenges our assumptions about faith, fear, and trust.

Chase Viscuse is a graduate student in Religious Studies at the University of Chicago. He specializes in studying religious practices that may seem bizarre, dangerous, or irrational from the outside. His work investigates the extremes of devotion, including fieldwork in serpent-handling communities and firsthand experience attending services with snakes on the altar.

Don’t miss this opportunity to rethink what it means to believe!

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.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

River North, River North, Chicago, United States