The World is (Always) About to End, No Zombies Required
This week, researchers at Cornell spent presumably valuable time determining the safest places to be…
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Apocalypse Now and Then: Our Global Death Wish
What ought we do about millennial thinking in our day? If the combined 1300 pages of these two books have taught me anything, it’s that we can’t make it just go away. There is something fascinating, and perverse, in the human psyche that seems to yearn for this world to be other than how it is, even if that means destroying it.
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A Year After the Non-Apocalypse: Where Are They Now?
No giant earthquake rippled across the surface of the earth but I wanted to know what happens next. If you’re absolutely sure the world is going to end on a specific day, and it doesn’t, what do you do? How do you explain it to yourself? What happens to your faith in God?
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The Other, Forgotten Apocalypse of 2011
I think I can safely assume that for most Americans, Camping and his miscalculated (and then re-calculated) doomsday predictions are of more curiosity than true salvific concern. Camping has been buried by subsequent news cycles and is the latest member of a cadre of religious leaders whom the Apocalypse passed by. But while May’s Apocalypse seems to have skipped over most of the world, it did land squarely on a hilltop in north-western Vietnam. It would behoove us to take notice of the complex and unexpected ways in which this spring’s apocalypticism rippled across the world…
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Harold Camping Is Not Sorry
Harold Camping admits he was wrong, but only in the most technical way. He wasn’t really wrong, he is saying, because he trusts God, and was just passing God’s false prophecy along. It’s not that he’s wrong, that’s not the point, and not that he’s sorry. This, Camping says, is just “how God brings His messages to mankind.” Apology and repentance this is not.
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Secular End Times & Apocalyptic ‘Roosters’
In his new book, Richard Landes argues that in addition to the obvious End Timers many secular movements—the French Revolution, Marxism, Nazism—can be better understood as millennialist or apocalyptic.
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The Heresy of End Times Predictions
Those apocalyptically-minded souls—nationalist and Republican, and all-too-knowing virtually to a person—are also ironically the most anti-democratic forces that contemporary Christianity has produced.
Read MoreRapture Fraud?
Atheist group asks California AG to investigate.
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Rapture Theology as Cultural Critique: What Camping’s Prediction Tells Us About Ourselves
It should not go unnoticed that Camping’s followers headed directly to Times Square (rather than Oakland, say) to prepare for the rapture. Times Square stands for ultimate worldliness, the crossroads of capitalism, the epicenter of corporate globalization. Camping’s group intentionally or unintentionally brought an alternative way of telling time and assessing value to the place for which time is money and values are a matter of cross-marketing, re-branding, and logo recognition.
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The Great Disappointment: When the World Fails to End on Schedule
For any student of American history, all of this sounds eerily familiar—right down to the revision of dates. American history is littered with predictions about the end of the world.
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