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CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
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UID:meetup-dca9c15d60@palaner.app
DTSTAMP:20260802T142321Z
DTSTART:20260818T220000Z
DTEND:20260818T233000Z
SUMMARY:Profs & Pints DC: Hell and Gone
LOCATION:Penn Social
DESCRIPTION:Saved in Palaner as: saved\n\nPalaner match: 33% · why: lots of
  people going\n\nProfs and Pints DC presents: “Hell and Gone\,” on America
 n belief in damnation and doomsday\, with Lindsay DiCuirci\, associate pro
 fessor of English at the University of Maryland\, Baltimore County and sch
 olar of nineteenth-century spiritualism\n\nAdvance tickets: $13.50 plus sa
 les tax and processing fees. Available at [https://events.ticketleap.com/t
 ickets/profsandpints/dc-hell .]\n\nOn highways across the American Midwest
  are giant billboards meant to inspire soul-searching. They carry messages
  such as “HELL IS REAL” and “If you died today\, where would you spend ete
 rnity?” Although the share of Americans who believe in hell has been slipp
 ing for two decades\, 59 percent of respondents to a 2023 Gallup poll stil
 l believed in its existence. On a related note\, 55 percent of respondents
  to a 2022 Pew Research poll expressed the belief that Jesus Christ will r
 eturn to earth someday as part of the earth’s apocalyptic ending.\n\nSpecu
 lation about the afterlife and the world’s end has been the pastime of the
 ologians\, laypeople and charlatans for millennia. The enduring concepts o
 f hell and the apocalypse have served as cultural barometers\, measuring t
 he status of all kinds of beliefs and behaviors far beyond those associate
 d with organized religion.\n\nJoin Professor Lindsay DiCuirci\, a scholar 
 of early American literature and print culture and of the spiritualist mov
 ement of the nineteenth century\, for a fascinating discussion of American
  beliefs about doom and damnation and their connection with broader worldv
 iews.\n\nWe’ll start by looking at early colonial America\, when Protestan
 t Christianity predominated. You’ll learn how back then questions related 
 to the end times and our fates after death were not simply personal or abs
 tract\, but factored into major societal conversations about art and liter
 ature\, social reform\, criminal justice\, and foreign and domestic policy
 . We’ll discuss Puritan poet Michael Wigglesworth’s famous 1666 work “Day 
 of Doom\,” which scared generations of young Christians with its graphic d
 epiction of fire and brimstone. Moving across the centuries\, we'll look a
 t abolitionist David Walker’s 1829 treatise “Appeal to the Colored Citizen
 s of the World\,” which called America itself “hell upon earth!!!” for peo
 ple of color. You’ll gain an appreciation of how the rhetoric—if not the r
 eality—of hell and the end times activated people’s conscience.\n\nWe’ll a
 lso examine how the concept of hell has always had its detractors\, even a
 mong self-identified Christians. Some of its most vocal opponents were nin
 eteenth-century spiritualists\, a diverse and diffuse group of people who 
 believed that they could speak with the dead. For spiritualists\, the elim
 ination of hell was a balm for those who are mourning but it also had grea
 t political potential. Many spiritualists were also radical reformers\, wo
 rking on issues like the abolition of slavery\, women’s liberation\, capit
 al punishment reform\, and indigenous rights. The idea that the soul not o
 nly lived forever but continued to learn and progress even after it was “d
 isrobed of the body” invigorated their quest for social justice on earth.\
 n\nToday\, beliefs about hell and the end of the world remain entangled wi
 th questions about human suffering\, the nature of justice\, and the futur
 e of the planet. You’ll emerge from the talk with a richer understanding o
 f how your views on various questions of our day are shaped by your assump
 tions about how it all will end. (Doors: $17\, or $15 with student ID. Lis
 ted time is for doors. The talk begins 30 minutes later.)\n\nImage: From “
 Pandemonium\,” an 1841 John Martin painting of the capital of hell as desc
 ribed in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” (Louvre Museum/Wikimedia).
URL:https://www.meetup.com/profs-and-pints-meetup/events/315560339/
CATEGORIES:palaner,saved
STATUS:TENTATIVE
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