Spring 2026 Events

It was written as a marketing campaign to sell flags, for the 400-year Columbus Day Anniversary, for a children's magazine, by a Christian Socialist — rewritten four times, and originally said with a hand gesture that looked identical to a Nazi salute. And then, despite the fact that a pledge to a flag rather than a constitution is extremely unusual, children made the pledge normal, wars made it urgent, Congress made it official, and America made it sacred. Join us for a look at a most unusual text and practice.

Nusbaum at Night: Fireside Chats Over Zoom — Freedom in America has never been fixed. It has always been argued, sung, pledged, and reimagined. Join Craig Wansink on these Monday evenings at 7:00 p.m. for 30–40 minutes as he explores how national symbols we take for granted emerged from conflict, controversy, and competing visions of liberty. Registration required by noon; register with kjackson@batten.edu or 757.455.3129.

America guarantees freedom of religion, but what happens when people push the boundaries of that promise? Drawing on real cases — churches built around ayahuasca ceremonies, mushroom sacraments, and strategic appeals to religious-freedom laws — scholar Brad Stoddard explores uncomfortable questions about sincerity, belief, and authority. Who gets to decide what counts as "real religion?" Do these churches reflect spiritual innovation, legal loophole-hunting, or something more honest than traditional religion sometimes allows?

This talk examines how belief, law, and power collide in contemporary America — and why those collisions matter far beyond psychedelics.

This annual endowed lectureship honors the life of Justine Nusbaum (1900–1991), a local humanitarian whose compassion and generosity reached people across religious, racial, and national lines.

For generations, the American Dream has promised freedom and opportunity — yet for many Black Americans, that promise has been delayed, denied, and deferred. This program explores Black excellence not as applause or achievement alone, but as sustained moral pressure on a nation reluctant to confront its contradictions. Through spoken word, a Frederick Douglass historical reenactment, music, visual art, and student scholarship, the evening asks: What happens when freedom is promised but postponed?

Participants:

• Frederick Douglass reenactor and author: Nathan Richardson
• Co-host: Rebecca Hooker, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies
• Co-host: Alicia "Sunny" Peoples, Associate Director of Civic Engagement, Tidewater Community College
• Speaker: Jeff Toussaint, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
• Batten University Africana Studies 111 Student Poster Presentation
• Art Exhibition by Batten University students and alumni

You may never have heard of evangelical purity culture or assume it has nothing to do with you. Yet this movement among White conservative evangelicals has profoundly shaped how sexuality has been taught, regulated, or avoided in American education. Emerging from the Religious Right, purity culture relied on myths about adolescent sexuality, same-sex love, and federal welfare programs to promote a singular sexual ethic tied to national strength. Examining purity culture helps us understand how what we now call White Christian nationalism mobilized fears about sexuality and racial difference to gain enduring political and cultural power.

In her new book, The Things She Carried, historian Kathleen B. Casey uncovers how something as ordinary as a purse became an extraordinary vessel of freedom across nearly two centuries. This lecture focuses on how purses served as portable private spaces that carried tools of resistance throughout the long Civil Rights and gay liberation movements — becoming powerful symbols of autonomy, survival, and the enduring struggle for equality.

Joseph Pulitzer used the statue to support everyday Americans, embarrass the wealthy elite, and watch newspaper sales soar. Congressmen saw it as a French publicity stunt. Boats found her a terrible lighthouse. Black Americans saw her as a powerful symbol of American hypocrisy. Suffragists protested. And Emma Lazarus used words that shaped the meaning of the statue in ways perhaps more powerful than the sculptor himself. Join us for new insights and discussion about one of America's favorite and greenest women.

In Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), Joe Jackson examines the Spanish-American War as a formative moment when America's identity shifted from republic to empire. Focusing on the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico — as well as the United States itself — Jackson traces how the language of liberation was used to justify expansion, blurring the line between freedom and authority, independence and occupation. This talk invites us to reconsider a war long framed as righteous and to ask what freedom meant then, and for whom.

Access to clean water is more than a public health necessity — it is a question of freedom, power, and justice. This interdisciplinary panel examines water as both a source of liberation and a tool of control. From communities transformed by a single well, to regions destabilized when water becomes weaponized, to the racial and social inequities exposed by crises like Flint, Michigan: How can water be a pathway to freedom rather than a barrier to it?

Thirst Project is the world's largest youth water nonprofit, working to end the global water crisis by building freshwater wells in developing communities.

Can you sell your kidney? Choose your own investments? Buy the house you want? In many cases, the answer is no. These aren't simply economic questions — they're questions about the boundaries of personal freedom in a complex society. Markets promise choice and opportunity, but laws, ethical constraints, and unequal access shape who can actually participate. This talk examines the limits placed on economic freedom and asks what those limits reveal about power, justice, and collective responsibility.

Sometimes an awards host risks getting punched. Sometimes a late-night comedian hides behind a persona to say the unsayable. And sometimes an actor onstage — especially with a puppet in hand — voices things they'd never say in their own name. Why do the jokes we shouldn't laugh at hit the hardest?

This panel explores humor at the edge — where comedy challenges power, exposes truth, and sometimes causes harm. A theatre director, a scholar of religion, law, and popular culture, and a performance historian reflect on who gets to joke about what, when humor tells the truth, and what freedoms satire tests and stretches.

Julia Ward Howe wrote The Battle Hymn of the Republic after hearing Union soldiers sing a crude song about John Brown's hanging body. Her rewrite — packed with violent apocalyptic imagery from the Book of Revelation — became the Union Army's anthem, the rallying cry of abolitionists, and the song that moved Lincoln to tears. Then it took on a strange second life: a tool of militarism and expansion, a wartime anthem, and eventually the soundtrack of the civil rights movement, quoted by Dr. King the night before he was killed. Join us to explore how one song became sacred scripture, political propaganda, and a prayer for justice.

What does it mean to tell the history of a place when entire communities were largely written out of it? Drawing from Queer Virginia: New Stories in the Old Dominion (University of Virginia Press, 2025), historian Charles Ford brings to light overlooked stories of LGBTQ+ life across the Commonwealth — from a Black transgender woman navigating Jim Crow-era Virginia, to a legendary lesbian bar in Norfolk, to the creation of queer archives in the former capital of the Confederacy. Ford explores how queer Virginians carved out spaces of belonging under hostile laws and social norms, demonstrating resilience, creativity, and courage in their pursuit of freedom, visibility, and equality.

In 1944 and 1945, Allied forces liberated hundreds of thousands of Jews from Nazi tyranny. For many, liberation initially brought overwhelming joy as palpable fear began to loosen its grip. Yet that joy quickly gave way to grief as survivors confronted the loss of families, communities, and entire worlds. This lecture explores how Jews experienced liberation through sound and sensation — how freedom was heard, felt, and processed in its earliest moments. Using sensory analysis, Sewell reveals liberation not as a single triumphant moment, but as a complex emotional passage shaped by trauma and memory.