Profs & Pints Baltimore: Hell and Gone

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Hell and Gone,” on American belief in damnation and doomsday, with Lindsay DiCuirci, associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and scholar of nineteenth-century spiritualism.

On highways across the American Midwest are giant billboards meant to inspire soul-searching. They carry messages such as “HELL IS REAL” and “If you died today, where would you spend eternity?” Although the share of Americans of people who believe in hell has been slipping for two decades, 59 percent of respondents to a 2023 Gallup poll still believed in its existence. On a related note, 55 percent of respondents to a 2022 Pew Research poll expressed the belief that Jesus Christ will return to earth someday as part of the earth’s apocalyptic ending.

Speculation about the afterlife and the world’s end has been the pastime of theologians, laypeople and charlatans for millennia. The enduring concepts…