This panel is in a hybrid format. Zoom link here.
Chaired by Einar Wigen
Hanne Amanda Trangerud: Making Sense of the Pandemic: The Passover Prophecies and the Glorious Future
On March 13, 2020, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency in the United States. To prevent the spread of COVID-19, states soon began to implement shutdowns, mask mandates, social distancing, and public gathering restrictions. While troublesome to all, the situation brought its distinctive challenges to Christian groups that consider in-person gatherings essential to their service. Some pastors—predominantly conservative Evangelicals supporting Trump’s reelection bid—disobeyed orders, kept their churches open, and decried the measure as religious persecution from leftist socialist political elites. Others reframed the situation as a part of God’s plan to save the nation. This paper focuses on one such story, in which time—past, present, and future—and the parallel of times played important roles.
In the Charismatic Evangelical community, divine revelations are commonplace, and prophecies are often used to make sense of events and difficulties. In this community, Chuck Pierce is a recognized prophetic voice. When the United States shut down, a Charismatic publishing house encouraged him to share his story, and his book hit the market a few months later. In The Passover Prophecies: How God is Realigning Hearts and Nations in Crisis, Pierce explains that God had told him about the pandemic several months before the new coronavirus was discovered: in September 2019, God allegedly revealed that “plague-like conditions” would “infiltrate the earth” in the spring of 2020. The plague would test the nations, but after the trial, there would be a “time of celebration” and a “glorious future” for God’s faithful people.
In addition to this linking of past (prophecy received), present (prophecy fulfilled), and future (prophecy’s effects), Pierce drew parallels between the current situation and a much older event: the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt (c. 15th – 13th century BC). According to Pierce, the two events were similar, both in content and in timing. It was no coincidence, Piece asserted, that the Christian Easter overlapped with the Jewish Passover in 2020. Rather, it was a part of God’s plan to bring the Christians closer to the original Passover, when the Israelites were delivered from slavery in Egypt. According to the biblical story, God had to strike Egypt with ten plagues before the king allowed them to leave. During the tenth plague, when all the firstborn in Egypt died, the Israelites had remained in their houses. They were spared from the plague because they, on God’s command, had marked their doorposts with the blood of a lamb. In Pierce’s narrative, Christians experienced a similar situation when the COVID-19 measures forced them to stay in their houses during Easter. This was to make them recognize the power of the blood, which in this case was the blood of Jesus. The subsequent forty days were presented as a test for Christians; if they responded properly, they would experience a spiritual revival.
This paper explores the message of Pierce’s Passover Prophecies, how he uses time and parallels of times to promote it, and possible political implications.
Bio: PhD candidate in the study of religion, IKOS, UiO. Scholar of religion + registered nurse.
Tony Joakim Ananiassen Sandset: Submission title The Multiple Temporalities of HIV in Global Health: From Fatal to Chronic and from Crisis to the End of AIDS
The global HIV epidemic have seen dramatic shifts in the last 30 years. Going from a fatal disease to a chronic disease for people living with HIV who adhere to daily antiretroviral treatment (ART), the new drive within the global HIV efforts is now to ‘end the AIDS epidemic’ within 2030. Within this field there are multiple and at times competing temporalities. Building on Adia Benton et.al. I will argue that understanding the multiple temporalities of the HIV epidemic is politically important in order to realize the goal of ‘ending AIDS’ within 2030. Temporal framings of HIV range from how HIV now in many instances is seen as a chronic disease signaling a shift in the temporality for people living with HIV. Yet, this is contingent upon what we can call ‘adherence time’, that is, the clock time of adhering daily to ART. Moreover, it also gloss over the long term survivors of HIV, many of whom very much still remember and lived through AIDS as a temporality of fatality. Another example of temporalities within HIV is the political calendar time of the UNs goal of ending AIDS within 2030. Juxtaposed with the lived temporalities of people living with HIV, the ‘end of AIDS’ which might be a far cry for those who live in ‘chronically’ underfunded health systems. Finally, the end of AIDS presupposes a form of ‘universal global health time’, a linear arrow towards 2030. Yet, this clashes with the multiple and local temporalities and local epidemic contexts.
Bio: Tony Sandset is Research Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Healthcare Education at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo. His work focuses on the intersections between biomedical HIV treatment and prevention and their social and political implications and contestations. Moreover, his work is concentrated upon the many paradoxes and tensions when sustainability thinking meets healthcare and global health policy
Ahmed Ragab: Plague Time: Epidemics, memory, and clinical culture in the Medieval Islamic World
What happens to time when the world is living under a pandemic? Looking at Black Death as a critical and quintessential pandemic, I investigate the epidemic’s medical temporalities by analyzing the works of the physicians who encountered the Black Death. I will investigate medical understandings of the disease’s etiology, progress, and treatment, as well as of contagion and predisposition. Second, I will look at piety and the place of religious temporality in governing plague time. There, I will address the religious history of the plague and its place within Muslim religious writings and imaginaries. I will also address questions related to the permissibility of medical care and the notion of despair as a temporal structure seen from a religious perspective. To conclude, I will address how and why epidemic temporality is connected to clinical and medical temporalities—in other words, why epidemic temporalities are a topic of the history of medicine and medical humanities. It will also address how Western historiography, rooted in linear temporality, can account for the repetitive and circular nature, the finality and repetition that constitutes epidemic temporality.
Bio: Ahmed Ragab is a historian, physician and a documentary filmmaker. He is the founding director of the independent Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, and co-founder of Pinwheel Productions—a film production studio dedicated to supporting Black, Brown and Queer artists and stories. He received his medical degree from Cairo University School of Medicine in 2005, and PhD from the Ecole Pratiques des Hautes Etudes in Paris in 2010.