Rags, Bones, and Other Sacred Objects
Every culture, every religion, every era has enshrined otherwise regular objects with a significance which stretches beyond their literal importance. Whether the bone of a Catholic martyr, the tooth of a Buddhist lama, or the cloak of a Sufi saint, relics are material conduits to the immaterial world. Yet relics aren’t just a feature of religion. The exact same sense of the transcendent animates objects of political, historical, and cultural significance.
Speaker Bio:
Ed Simon is Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University, the editor of The Pittsburgh Review of Books, and a staff writer for Literary Hub. A widely published writer, he is the author of over a dozen books, including Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology and Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain.
Hosted & Curated By:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
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