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The benefits of (studying) negative and aggressive prayer
Most people associate prayer with moral good: benevolence, forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation. Yet in some cases, people deliberately pray against others in forms of what I call “aggressive...
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Curse God and die: On Agamben and Job
The book of Job is a book about curses. That is what is at stake in the accuser’s wager with God: “stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face” (Job 1:11);...
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Charismatic malediction, or martyrdom in antebellum America
In an 1850 pamphlet, “The Law-Abiding Conscience and the Higher Law Conscience,” the Reverend Samuel T. Spear observed, “Every professed martyr virtually appeals to posterity and to God, to review his...
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Curses, foiled again and again
In June 2009, I was interviewing a Fijian Methodist minister on the island of Matuku when the subject of curses came up. I had asked him about mana and sau, terms associated with spiritual power, which...
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Malediction, exorcism, and evil
It is best to begin by considering the word malediction in the simple sense of speaking evil or evil-saying. The idea of evil—male—is conceptually, existentially, morally, and cosmologically complex,...
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