Biography
Blake Long is a second-year student in the Master of Divinity program at Yale University. He is originally from the mountains of East Tennessee, where he completed a B.S. in Pastoral Ministry at Lee University. His research interests converge at the point of queer studies and global Pentecostal theology/history. Beyond his primary research, he is passionate about ecology and its connections to religious experience and justice.
Paper Abstract
This paper explores Pentecostal snake-handling as a kind of icon for reimagining relationality within pneumatic eco-theologies. By examining the modern proliferation of Pentecostal scholarship alongside its expanding environmental concerns, I will situate snake-handling practices within a broader ecological movement attentive to a Spirit-saturated creation.
Engaging various natural theologies and scholarly work on non-human sentience, I will attempt to develop a constructive account of non-human creation as Spirit-endowed siblings whose lives exemplify cosmic and spiritual interdependence rather than hierarchy. Within this schema, the serpents encountered in early (and some contemporary) American Pentecostal communities become relational agents who are discerning, Spirit-filled, and exercise a pneumatic form of relational knowledge, allowing the pneumatic serpent to evaluate, respond to, and spiritually “interpret” the human creature.
This kind of pneumatic connection demonstrates a mode of relationality often left unconsidered in theological thought. Ultimately, I argue that a methodological turn towards the social deviance and strangeness of some theological communities, modeled through the communicative agency of non-human creatures in Pentecostal snake-handling practices, opens up new possibilities for overcoming ecological dualisms and for imagining ecotheology as a site of reciprocal discernment, ecological reconciliation, and renewed theological imagination.