Sense of an Ending and the Imagination of the End: Apocalypse, Disaster and Messianic Time

Abstract

Apocalyptic visions go beyond Christian eschatology and permeate our present imagination. Not so much with already bygone symbolism or the terror of bloody carnage, as with the vague sense of an ending, fuelled by historical conditions – the Holocaust, the nuclear crisis, or the more contemporary global threats of a viral pandemic or climate change. The 11th issue of Colloquia Humanistica is devoted to various understandings of the end, introduced by the topics of apocalypse, disaster and messianic time. The articles gathered in the volume may be read separately as examples of analysis of several end-time-directed narratives, but they also constitute a whole that may indicate the specific features of thinking about the end.