Just to shed some light on the source of the problem: The sela_footer_entry_meta() function in the parent theme’s inc/template-tags.php file is looking for values to populate a permalink–values that I don’t think exist in the function’s context. The function appears to only populate a permalink if there’s nothing else to display (in other words, if the category is uncategorized and there are no tags, the function displays a permalink to the post).
I’m using a child theme on top of Sela, and happily, the parent function is pluggable (you Automatticons are always thinking ahead!). If you are using a child theme, you can override the function pretty easily. I wrote a solution, but alexuadrop’s solution (offered in the comments of this thread), works really well for my situation and it’s much more elegant. You might want to give it a try by adding it to your child theme’s function.php file. But, I am looking forward to a sela parent solution for this problem. ??