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

📍 Location: Exact address given in confirmation email

🧠 Lecture: "Religious Appalachia: Faith, Fangs, and Fire"

🎙️ Speaker: Chase Viscuse

Join us for a gripping evening as graduate student Chase Viscuse takes us inside the world of serpent-handling churches in Appalachia, where believers take up venomous snakes, drink poison, and handle fire as acts of worship.

This talk will explore how risk becomes sacred, how communities find meaning in danger, and what these practices reveal about faith, trust, and belief in action. Whether you’re curious, skeptical, or simply fascinated, you’ll encounter a tradition that challenges conventional assumptions about what it means to follow, believe, and surrender.

Chase is a graduate student in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, studying religious practices that can appear extreme, dangerous, or puzzling from the outside. His research examines how faith shapes risk and devotion, using snake-handling communities as a lens into how people make meaning through danger and surrender. He has spent time in these communities, spoken with practitioners, and, to his family’s concern, continues to attend services with venomous snakes.

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

Agenda

7:30 PM – Doors open: find a seat (open seating!), order food & drinks, and expect a bar line—arriving early is key.

7:55 PM – Host introduction

8:00 PM – Lecture begins

8:45 PM – Audience Q&A

9:00 PM – Have 1:1 time with the speaker, mingle with fellow guests, and order another round

9:30 PM – Wrap up.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Arts District, Arts District, Los Angeles, United States

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

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