Apocalyptic Ideas Research Articles

Handmaids of the Apocalypse: Queen Gerberga, Empress Adelaide, and the Ottonian Tenth Century

AbstractGerberga of Saxony, the sister of Otto I of Germany and wife of Louis IV of France, receives frequent scholarly mention in relation to a treatise by Adso of Montier-en-Der circa 950–954. The topic of this short work, presented as a letter to Gerberga in answer to a question she posed to the monk, was the life of the Antichrist, that fearful servant of Satan who would appear before Christ's Second Coming, lead whole nations into damnable error, and kill many who would not apostatize before being defeated by Jesus himself at his return. The treatise eventually become the foundation of centuries of Christian apocalyptic thought. But despite her prominence in the letter, Gerberga has received no sustained examination by historians regarding her interest and promotion of apocalyptic thought beyond being a recipient of Adso's letter. At most, scholars tend to see Gerberga as if through the eyes of Adso, that is, as a nervous queen anxious to be reassured that a universal evil is not hiding just around the corner. Such views—wholly unintentional but nevertheless present—do her a great disservice and misunderstand the motivations of both Gerberga and Adso present in the letter, as well as Gerberga's younger, apocalyptically minded in-law, the empress Adelaide. This essay examines Gerberga's life not simply as it relates to Adso's work but in relation to the very personal, family-driven politics of both East and West Francia in the tenth century. When placed in her proper context, we find Gerberga was not merely a passive recipient of apocalyptic ideas for a brief period in the early 950s but was an active patron whose interest shaped imperial politics for generations.

A Beautiful Ending: The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Making of the Modern World by John Jeffries Martin

One may not expect to see the apocalyptic imagination foregrounded as a key constituent element in the traditional telling of modernity’s origins. According to Martin, however, apocalyptic ideas are deeply embedded in modern thinking about the nature of history, its direction, and human aspirations to shape its outcome.Martin began his research for this book intending to write a straightforward history of Early Modern Europe from the age of Columbus until the French Revolution, and that original plan can still be seen in the volume’s chronological progression and organization. All of the major historical touchstones and markers for the making of the Early Modern Era remain present, including among other developments the invention of print, the European encounter with the Americas, the rise of the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, and the ensuing Wars of Religion. The project took a different turn, however, when Martin discerned a particular thread running through those critical centuries of transition between the medieval and modern worlds, namely, that of apocalyptic ideas and millennialist hopes for “a beautiful ending” to history—a Golden Age of justice, prosperity, and peace before the end of time.In his compelling tour of apocalypticism from c. 1400 to 1700, Martin finds numerous examples to substantiate this finding—such as the fact that the oldest surviving printed text from Europe relates to the Final Judgment; that Columbus perceived his voyages as fulfilling biblical prophecies; the strands of messianic thinking that informed Hapsburg imperial ideology; the utopian visions of authors such as Thomas More; and the battles between Protestant and Catholic reformers, which seemed to suggest the final tribulations under the Antichrist were at hand, thereby setting the stage for the ultimate triumph of the Elect.Beneath Martin’s engaging prose, there lies a long-standing and far-reaching academic debate over the relationship between (premodern) theology of history and (modern) philosophy of history, associated with the likes of Löwith and Blumenberg. Löwith argued that modern theories of historical progress (evident in the works of figures such as Georg Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx) represented “secularized” versions of theological interpretations of history (displayed by thinkers such as Augustine of Hippo and Joachim of Fiore).1 Blumenberg posited instead a definitive rupture between medieval and modern temporal conceptualizations of history, as the latter jettisoned the former’s stultifying reliance on God as the architect of a foreordained historical plan that would end in the apocalypse.2 Indeed, Blumenberg explicitly flagged apocalyptic modes of thought as antithetical to modern notions of open-ended historical progress and human agency within the arena of time. Apocalypticism and modernity thus stand at odds with one another.Martin seems to adopt a far more “Löwithesque” perspective, offering his assessment that “Modernity was, in the end, a providential product” (10) and that “the apocalyptic imagination and the hope and energies it inspired played a fundamental role in the shaping of the modern world” (12). As evident in his copious notes, Martin is well aware of the greater stakes in this topic, which are part of a wider debate over secularization and modernity writ large.A Beautiful Ending strikes me as making two especially important contributions. First, Martin calls attention to the fact that Christian apocalyptic ideas, the ones that predominantly shaped European thinking, were just one strand in what he calls an “apocalyptic braid,” bound up with contemporary Jewish and Islamic ideas about the divinely ordained course of history. Admittedly, trained as an expert in Early Modern Europe, his focus remains mostly on the European tradition. But his discussion of how print enabled the dissemination of rabbinical texts on the Final Things, for example, or about the political implications of Ottoman prophecies about the end-times, provides a far richer picture of how apocalyptic ideas shaped intellectual life and culture beyond the confines of Christian Europe.Second, Martin reminds us that, while millenarian visions of the future could inspire violence, rebellion, and fear of “outsiders” as agents of apocalyptic evil, in some instances the longing for the end also generated optimism, egalitarianism, and an ecumenical spirit. That sense of optimism about the end-times seems to be the true casualty of the secular and scientific impulses that eventually came to dominate modern theorizing about time and history. While it is hard to find a “beautiful ending” in the promise of nuclear destruction or the unfolding disasters caused by climate change, perhaps, as Martin speculates in his epilogue, we can and should devise new ways of thinking about the “catastrophes that have littered and continue to litter human history without having recourse to the apocalyptic” (250). Given how deeply the apocalyptic braid is woven into the broader fabric of modernity, he seems to feel that the providential appeal of a beautiful ending is far from exhausted.

Understanding the Question ‘What is Philosophy?’ in the Apocalyptic ‘End of Time’

While Stalinism destroyed the Bolshevik Revolution completely by replacing Marx’s idea of communism as the ‘association of free people’ with a dictatorship of the despotic Oriental version of state capitalism that masqueraded as socialism, liberalism, fascism, and authoritarianism (the three axes of modern capitalist societies) have led not only to the collapse and destruction of reason, but also to the destruction of the very basis of critical thinking itself. This essay claims that Slavoj Žižek’s idea of the Denkverbot (‘prohibition against thinking’) is an important idea that raises the importance of philosophy to not only counter the rise of global versions of authoritarianism, but also to critique late imperialism in permanent and terminal crisis. It talks of the apocalyptic idea of the ‘end of time’, a biblical theme that is now being put into practice in Ukraine with the Russian invasion and fueled by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bloc of nations which, like Russia, can only exist with the help of images of the apocalypse. What must be mentioned is that while Stalin replaced Marxism as critical theory with authoritarian dogma and while fascism completely repressed classical German philosophy to create a nationalist mytho-politics of the ‘Aryan race’, the discipline of rigorous philosophy was banished in universities by neoliberal capitalism for whom philosophy as critical thinking had to be supplemented by the principles of hyper-consumerism and the corresponding ‘complete regression of thinking’. This essay is on the very important questions ‘What is called philosophical thinking?’ and ‘How can revolutionary thinking transcend the domain of the counterrevolutionary repressed mind?’ and, most importantly, the very burning question: ‘What is philosophy?’

Paul and the Apocalypse of the Gospel

Apocalyptic thinking permeates Paul’s ideas about the gospel, God, the present age, and what is to come. Paul in his letters not only writes about the revelations that he himself has received (Gal 1:11–12, 2:2), but also how the gospel reveals God’s ultimate justice (Rom 1:17). Apocalypticism as an ideology is fundamentally concerned with justice and the expectation of a future intervention that will conclusively reconcile the injustices of the world with the justice of God. Though of course Paul never sat down and wrote an “Apocalypse” or even an apocalyptic letter, his letters reveal glimpses of the apocalyptic ways Paul thought about the world and humanity’s place in it. This article reviews the history and main tenets of apocalypticism and then examines three fundamental areas of apocalyptic thinking as expressed in Paul’s letters: the idea of apocalypse as full disclosure, the apocalyptic promise of full justice, and Paul’s use of apocalyptic ideas to reorient his readers to thinking about true-but-hidden identity, both of the “present evil age” (Gal 1:4) and of one’s current place in it. Paul draws upon and employs apocalyptic imagery to solve practical problems in his communities, equipping them to face the world with a full cosmic perspective.

Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction by Susan Watkins

Reviewed by: Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction by Susan Watkins Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor Susan Watkins. Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. ix +219 pp. Several days after September 11, 2001, Guardian critic James Wood commented on contemporary novels' attempts to contain the uncontainable through encyclopedic proportion. Wood proposed that hysterical realism overtook literary fiction at the turn of century, conjuring a picture of an emasculated generation of (male and female) storytellers, with a couple exceptions (such as Don Delillo), who just don't have it in them to respond adequately to the times. Wood took to task the then-first-time author Zadie Smith for falling into a characteristic evasiveness and lack of authentic feeling. In a [End Page 586] wry response entitled "This Is How It Feels to Me," Smith conceded that the millennial literary landscape is shadowed by fear and the realization that the center is not, in fact, holding. But after all, she averred, is it so irrational and weak-minded of a writer, particularly right after the apocalyptic event in New York, to feel (like everybody else) disoriented or untethered, fearful—even terrified? If the self-proliferating stylistics of her and others' novels targeted by Wood are some form of psycho-social defense, thanks to a general sense of approaching doom, what makes such self-conscious defensiveness inauthentic, or lacking in writerly craft and moral seriousness? Twenty years on, as Susan Watkins's Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction notes, the question of adequate response to the manifold anxieties attending the collapse of one world and the emergence of another remains. She cites Ursula Heise's observation that the prevalence of contemporary dystopias indicates a desire to "unsettle the status quo, but by failing to outline a persuasive alternative, they end up reconfirming it" (10). The suggestion of inauthenticity appears again: "survivalists [are] hard to tell apart from hipsters, their portrayals of apocalypse [recycling] well-known motifs" (Heise qtd. in Watkins 10). Watkins concurs to an extent but warns against extending critical skepticism onto today's postapocalyptic fiction, which comprises critical dystopian and utopian modes. An increasing number of women authors, less committed to the legacy of the heroic narrative and its sense of an ending, are leading the way. As Watkins states at the opening of her study, "conventional apocalyptic fiction (usually male-authored) tends toward conservatism" (1), toward a nostalgia for the time before, and/or a restoration of the world, centered around the nuclear family. Woman-authored novels in this genre, Watkins argues, go a different way—and they must: "My argument is not that women are bound to write end-of-world fiction in a particular way because they are intrinsically different from men . . . Rather, I claim that women writers' fictional engagement with apocalyptic ideas and forms is inevitably related to their specific subject positions in the contemporary moment" (2). In short, we are talking about a feminist standpoint. Feminist critical intervention has meant writing against the end, argues Watkins, "focus[ing] on analysing the ways in which patriarchy and neo-colonialism are intrinsically implicated in the disasters they envision. Rather than nostalgia and restoration . . . they successfully transform and rewrite the apocalyptic genre to imagine different possible futures for humanity post-apocalypse" (1). Feminist attention to situatedness and embodiment, gender and sexuality, crucially distinguishes women's [End Page 587] postapocalyptic fiction from men's, the author claims, and Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction lucidly articulates how women writers since Mary Shelley (especially her The Last Man [1826]) have interrogated apocalyptic and postapocalyptic narrative as symbolic form. Imbricated in this study of (un)anticipated endings and belated beginnings is the urgency of women's agency, not in driving the rebirth of mankind but rather in generating radical forms of difference that open up possibility or hope. A rich introductory chapter ("Rewriting and Transforming Traditions") gathers the threads of feminist literary and philosophical critiques by Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Elizabeth Grosz, Donna Haraway, Heise, Melanie Klein, Adrienne Rich, and others who have remarked on the absence of intersectional analysis that feminist and postcolonial writers and scholars bring to bear. Watkins also situates her monograph...

Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse

Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse

On the Emergence of the Iranian Apocalypse Between the Sixth and Seventh Centuries

The Iranian apocalyptic texts belong to the body of Pahlavi literature that was written in the ninth and tenth centuries. While most scholarship points to the early Islamic reworking and redaction of these apocalyptic accounts, which is clearly evident in the overlapping narratives, various late Sasanian historical and apocalyptic material still seems to be detectable. This article reassesses the identification of some Iranian apocalyptic figures, in order to discuss the origin of some literary models that were likely shared with some coeval neighboring traditions. It will thereby situate the emergence of Iranian apocalyptic ideas between the end of the sixth to the first decades of the seventh century.

Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse

Terrible Revolution: Latter-day Saints and the American Apocalypse

Climate Change and the Politics of Apocalyptic Redirection

Alison McQueen’s study of the historical role of apocalyptic ideas in realist political theory cautiously proposes the ‘redirection’ of apocalyptic thought as a plausible alternative to its rejection. Apocalyptic redirection, so understood, uses apocalyptic language to describe potential future catastrophes in order to inspire drastic action to prevent them. Although McQueen acknowledges that apocalyptic redirection may have certain risks, she suggests it may be an appropriate response to the crisis of climate change. In this article, I aim to show that this use of the discourse of apocalyptic redirection is ideologically problematic. I argue that it involves conflating the interests of those who are at least moderately materially comfortable with the interests of humanity as a whole. I will also draw on the 2019 ‘Stop Adani Convoy’ in Australia as a case study to show how the ideological character of this discourse renders it ill-suited to generating popular support for action on climate change, and liable to reproduce existing power relations.

دور النبوءات في إرهاب داعش

Purpose: This study aims to reveal how ISIS exploits apocalyptic prophecies stated in the Qur’an and hadiths to find new recruits and legitimize its ideology. The study tries to identify how sensitive issues of Islam are misinterpreted to mislead and terrorize young Muslims. It also elucidates how the misuse of innocent verses and hadiths leads to terrorism in the hands of people with fundamentalist beliefs. Approach: All issues of two ISIS magazines, namely, Dabiq and Rumiyah, were reviewed, and the related articles were selected, examined and compared with traditional Sunni Islam’s eschatology. In addition to the content analysis of the two magazines entitled with the apocalyptic names, previously written literature was also examined for this study. Findings: ISIS used eschatology to persuade Muslim youth to immigrate to its so-called lands and fight for its lofty cause. The terrorist group tried to realize this goal mainly by reinterpreting prophetic promises of Islam for its ends in the media. The analysis shows that ISIS did not serve religion but benefited its radical ideology. However, time has shown that ISIS’s brutal cause was far from the Islamic faith, as none of ISIS’s apocalyptic prophecies came true. Originality: While there are many studies about ISIS, few or none of them analyzed how the movement deceived people with apocalyptic ideas, which need to be considered during an examination of the conflicts in the Middle East, where states (e.g., Israel) or regimes (e.g., Iran) are founded on the basis of apocalyptic prophecies. ISIS was another trial that failed. By not examining the core of ISIS ideology stemming from the distorted interpretation of Islamic prophecies, gray zones would be left in the literature. This study makes that zone clearer.

The Last Conspiracy: Sabbat, Apocalypse, and Anti-Catholicism in English Demonological Treatises (C. 1587–1648)

The elaborated concept of witchcraft, one of the intellectual foundations of Early Modern European witch-hunts, has frequently been considered marginal or even absent from English elite demonological discourse, which was usually assumed to be a moderate or an incomplete version of the continental theorizations about witches and demons produced during the same period. This article aims to demonstrate that both the core elements of the sabbat stereotype and the belief in the idea of a diabolical conspiracy to overthrow Christian society were crucial to the representation of witchcraft fashioned in English demonological treatises between 1587 and 1648. The use of these ideas in England, however, had distinctive features. I suggest that the intellectual and cultural context of English Reformation, particularly the development of apocalyptic ideas and anti-Catholicism, determined the English conceptualization of witchcraft as a conspiracy.

The Meeting of the Three Temples: Co-celebrating with the Angels in Early Christian Liturgies

A new inspection of the ancient liturgical pattern of praying with the angels unveils that Jewish materials limited it to the priestly class and such legendary figures as Enoch, Abraham, Moses, or Elijah. The classical Christian anaphoras of the third and fourth centuries will extend this pattern to the entire congregation based on the early Christian generalization of the priestly status to all the members of the ecclesia. While shifting the focus of discussion to the concepts of “temple” and “priest,” the study finds that these Christian anaphoras include both the Jerusalem Temple feature of serving in front of God’s descended glory and the Second Temple apocalyptic idea of celebrating in the heavenly sanctuary. The earthly and heavenly temples, therefore, become one liturgical space which also intersects a third temple, that of the human being, within which God also descends, sanctifies it, and receives due worship.

The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam by Stephen J. Shoemaker

Reviewed by: The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam by Stephen J. Shoemaker Jay Rubenstein Stephen J. Shoemaker The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018 Pp. viii + 260. $59.95. Stephen J. Shoemaker’s The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam grows out of his previous book, The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad’s Life and the Beginnings of Islam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). There, Shoemaker argued that Islam, at its point of origin, centered on apocalyptic ideas. In the current volume, he wanted to answer the most frequent objection that audiences raised: if the first Muslims believed the end was near, why did they bother to build an empire? In the late antique world, Shoemaker responds, apocalypticism was always enmeshed in concepts of empire. One might observe further that eschatological programs, medieval and modern alike, have served as calls to action rather than to surrender and withdrawal. In any case, Shoemaker sensed a lacuna, and The Apocalypse of Empire is his response. In this book, Shoemaker ranges well beyond Islamic themes, offering a sweeping history of apocalyptic thought over the course of eight centuries, including Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, as well as Muslims. Such a broad survey is, of necessity, less a close reading of sources and more a general presentation of historiography, but one made in this case with a single argumentative purpose. For while on the surface the book offers a case for the enduring power of eschatology to shape imperial dreams, in practice, its narrative looks always toward the rise of Islam and how preceding apocalyptic dialogues gave it shape. The nexus between apocalypse and empire begins in earnest, in Shoemaker’s analysis, at a traditional point: the reign of the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175–164 b.c.e.). His programmatic persecution of Jews, beginning in 167 b.c.e., inspired a handful of apocalyptic texts, notably the biblical book of Daniel as well as other short works collected in 1 Enoch. These powerfully [End Page 335] imagined texts served as calls either to resist or rebel against Antiochus’s rule. When Macedonian hegemony ended, the apocalyptic ideology survived, but the identity of the villains shifted to the new rulers, the Romans. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, the communities of Qumran presented themselves as training for war against Rome during the Last Days, which lay not in the future but rather had already begun. Later Jewish writers, particularly after Roman armies destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in 70 c.e., continued to weave themes of war and judgment into anti-imperial texts. Against this background the actual book of “Apocalypse,” John of Patmos’s Revelation, receives surprisingly short shrift. Presumably, John falls too much on the side of “patient endurance” rather than active resistance. Still, and plainly, Revelation has proven a supple enough text, and the millenarian vision of chapter 20 a dangerous enough idea, that The Apocalypse of Empire would have benefited from a more extended consideration of it. Later Christian apocalypticism faced a unique challenge. The key variable, and the obvious one, is Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. The traditional anti-imperial tone of eschatology turned on its head. Instead of a parody of godly rule, Constantine’s court became a precursor of heaven. The chief literary product of this revision was the oracle of the Tiburtine Sibyl, to which Shoemaker devotes most of the second chapter. Composed in the late fourth century and circulated in several languages with multiple revisions over the course of centuries, it is a notoriously difficult text to work with. The most controversial point is its ending. In most manuscript copies, the Sibyl concludes with the story of the Last World Emperor, a character who unites a faltering Roman Empire against armies of barbarians and pagans. Under his rule, a reinvigorated Rome achieved an astonishing series of military victories, until the emperor decided to lay down his crown in Jerusalem. Some readers question whether this legend was part of the original Tiburtine Sibyl or...

Vicent Ferrer, misionero apocalíptico. Sobre el uso de la pedagogía del terror en sus sermones medievales hispanos

El estudio del sentido de los sermones sobre el fin del mundo de Vicent Ferrer ha ocupado bastantes páginas en las últimas décadas. Su caso ha sido incluido en múltiples análisis sobre las ideas del Apocalipsis y el Anticristo en el período tardomedieval. Lo cierto es que su imagen –simbólica y pictórica– aparece usualmente ligada a su predicación del final a través de significantes visuales medievales del Apocalipsis. Eso no es casual; sin duda se debe a la intensidad de la predicación vicentina y a su énfasis en la pronta llegada del final de los tiempos. Con la constante actualización de las estrategias para el estudio histórico de la predicación medieval se impone, sin embargo, una revisita a la predicación apocalíptica vicentina Este trabajo se propone abordar las estrategias específicas de la predicación del inminente final de los tiempos considerando las formas de persuasión sermonísticas como estrategias pedagógicas del terror. Es decir, detectar y analizar los elementos discursivos que pretenden un objetivo pastoral a través de la predicación de ideas que causan temor en quienes lo oyen. Esto sin abandonar la perspectiva de que la pedagogía no es una mera estrategia intencionada, sino que se ejerce en la voz de agente de comunicación social, formado en altas casas de estudio, con una trayectoria propia y en un contexto de producción específico.

Do Religious Ideas Cause Violence?

ABSTRACTSocial science seldom takes religion seriously. Graeme Wood shows the folly of this neglect in The Way of the Strangers, his portrayal of the apocalyptic religious ideas held by some of the most ardent ISIS followers. The actions and devotion of members of the Islamic State cannot be understood without grasping what Wood is telling us. Still, a central question remains: Do these religious ideas inevitably lead to violence? Here the jury is still out, since a focus solely on religion, without the socio-political context, can give a skewed perspective on the motives of this violent politico-religious movement.

Religion in the Achaemenid Persian Empire: Emerging Judaisms and Trends

Religion in the Achaemenid Persian Empire: Emerging Judaisms and Trends

If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right by Christopher Douglas

Reviewed by: If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right by Christopher Douglas Mark Eaton Christopher Douglas. If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2016. viii + 367 pp. Christopher Douglas opens his book If God Meant to Interfere: American Literature and the Rise of the Christian Right with what he calls a "vivid literary snapshot" (2), one likely familiar to literary critics who have followed the rise of so-called postsecular literary studies. The snapshot in question appears in Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985); it is Jack Gladney's conversation with a nun while being treated for a gunshot wound to his wrist in a Catholic hospital. "As belief shrinks from the world," the nun tells him, "people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe" (qtd in. Douglas 1–2). Accordingly, Catholic nuns fulfill a kind of surrogate role in a secular age: "We are your fools, your madwomen, rising at dawn to pray, lighting candles, asking statues for good health, long life" (qtd. in Douglas 2). This world-weary sister is perfectly aware that many people regard her as a sort of walking anachronism, someone whose habit and vow of chastity necessarily remind them of a more devout age. As if nostalgic for certainty and blind devotion, unbelievers still need believers to believe. John A. McClure, Amy Hungerford, and others have read such postsecular ambivalence as evidence of a new sensibility, a new mode of being in the world that is skeptical about religious [End Page 182] doctrines while also resistant to secular constructions of reality. These partial faiths, to borrow McClure's useful phrase from the title of his Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison, represent a third way between religious dogmatism and secularism. Yet Douglas reads the passage differently. "Perhaps caught in her own parochial enclave," he writes, "the nun seems unaware that many Americans continued to believe strongly in many of the ideas she derides, including God, the devil, angels, hell, heaven, and even the final battle between the heavenly host and Satan's forces" (2). Insofar as the nun is suggesting that such beliefs are in decline, she is "spectacularly wrong," as it turns out. Far from being in decline at the time DeLillo was writing White Noise, angels were in vogue, apocalyptic ideas were everywhere (even in the White House), evangelical churches were booming, and conservative reactions to changing cultural mores were spawning the culture wars. Indeed, for Douglas, the real question is how such an astute cultural observer as DeLillo could have missed the obvious religious resurgence of the period. American writers and literary critics either failed to recognize or willfully ignored the rise of conservative Christianity in the late twentieth century, according to Douglas. As if stuck inside a secular bubble of their own making ever since the State of Tennessee v. Scopes trial of 1925, when Christian fundamentalists were ridiculed and stigmatized in the national press, many intellectuals were caught off guard by the fundamentalist revival a half-century later. As such, they missed "the most important national development in religion in that period" (2). If God Meant to Interfere seeks to understand not only how "the social and political empowerment of conservative Christianity" came about, but also why so many writers found it difficult to grasp its resurgence—or, at any rate, why they didn't write about it. By tracing the rise of the religious right as a largely "unrecognized religious context for US literary production since the 1970s," this book fills an important gap in our scholarship (3). The most provocative claim of the book is that US writers most often represented the conservative Christian resurgence indirectly (when they did so at all). "The reasons for indirection and evasion were not just the unanticipated reversal of the master narrative of secularization, though that did play a part," Douglas contends, but also the fact that "multiculturalism and postmodernism became complexly intertwined with the resurgence" (4). The new evangelicalism of the 1970s and 1980s appropriated aspects of multiculturalism and postmodernism for its own purposes, thus realigning...

Shared Ideas in Job and Deutero-Isaiah

AbstractIt has been suggested that the books of Job and of Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 40–55) have a variety of similarities in their linguistic features and common subject-matter and because of this, it has been argued that there is literary dependence or influence of one book upon the other. Although such an author-oriented approach, by which scholars explain similarities by the theory of literary references, has some value, there is no specific reason to understand those similarities by a sort of direct literary dependence. However, these two books are likely to include the common scribal mindset of the Persian period. Here I put forward shared ideas of God’s universal control and freedom which are distinct from the Mosaic covenant and apocalyptic ideas. With these comparisons between Job/Deutero-Isaiah and other concepts in the Hebrew Bible, I propose the dating of the two books and argue that these cultural ideas about God’s control and freedom reflect the Persian scribal idea on the formation of the two books.

Talking Skulls: On Some Personal Accounts of Hell and Their Place in Apocalyptic Literature

AbstractEstablished definitions of apocalypticism and apocalyptic literature in Late Antiquity often disregard a variety of apocalyptic visions and ideas that are included in a variety of genres of the Christian literature of Late Antiquity. The present paper discusses personal afterlife accounts and more specifically, personal hell visions, as found in various Christian texts and sources, such as monastic and hagiographical or martyrological literature. These visions and their special features are analysed in the context of related apocalyptic literature and traditions, as well as in their relationship with pagan local traditions and necromantic rituals. As will be argued, personal accounts of afterlife present a specific literary phenomenon in the history of ancient Christian apocalyptic literature and tradition, but they also demonstrate a significant diachronic popularity in other religious communities and their literatures.

The Shock of the New: The Origin of the Age of Aquarius and the 2012 Phenomenon

The recent attention paid to the prophecy that December 2012 was to be a pivotal moment in world history has renewed interest in the relationship between astronomy and apocalyptic ideas. This paper examines the background to the ‘2012 Phenomenon’ by exploring the origins of the idea of the Age of Aquarius. It concludes that the Age is best understood as a means of objectifying the prediction of a future golden age by reference to measurable astronomical certainties. In line with the revolutionary traditions of western millenarianism, the Aquarian Age is counter-cultural and opposed to political and religious authorities.