Download or read book Catastrophism written by Sasha Lilley and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2012-10-05 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in catastrophic times. The world is reeling from the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression, with the threat of further meltdowns ever-looming. Global warming and myriad dire ecological disasters worsen—with little if any action to halt them—their effects rippling across the planet in the shape of almost biblical floods, fires, droughts, and hurricanes. Governments warn that there is no alternative to the bitter medicine they prescribe—or risk devastating financial or social collapse. The right, whether religious or secular, views the present as catastrophic and wants to turn the clock back. The left fears for the worst, but hopes some good will emerge from the rubble. Visions of the apocalypse and predictions of impending doom abound. Across the political spectrum, a culture of fear reigns.? Catastrophism explores the politics of apocalypse—on the left and right, in the environmental movement—and examines why the lens of catastrophe can distort our understanding of the dynamics at the heart of these numerous disasters—and fatally impede our ability to transform the world. Lilley, McNally, Yuen, and Davis probe the reasons why catastrophic thinking is so prevalent, and challenge the belief that it is only out of the ashes that a better society may be born. The authors argue that those who care about social justice and the environment should jettison doomsaying—even as it relates to indisputably apocalyptic climate change. Far from calling people to arms, they suggest, catastrophic fear often results in passivity and paralysis—and, at worst, reactionary politics.?
Download or read book Imagining Apocalyptic Politics in the Anthropocene written by Earl T. Harper and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together scholars from English literature, geography, politics, the arts, environmental humanities and sociology, Imagining Apocalyptic Politics in the Anthropocene contributes to the emerging debate between bodies of thought first incepted by scholars such as Mouffe, Whyte, Kaplan, Hunt, Swyngedouw and Malm about how apocalyptic events, narratives and imaginaries interact with societal and individual agency historically and in the current political moment. Exploring their own empirical and philosophical contexts, the authors examine the forms of political acting found in apocalyptic imaginaries and reflect on what this means for contemporary society. By framing their arguments around either pre-apocalyptic, peri-apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic narratives and events, a timeline emerges throughout the volume which shows the different opportunities for political agency the anthropocenic subject can enact at the various stages of apocalyptic moments. Featuring a number of creative interventions exclusively produced for the work from artists and fiction writers who engage with the themes of apocalypse, decline, catastrophe and disaster, this innovative book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the politics of climate change, the environmental humanities, literary criticism and eco-criticism.
Download or read book Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times written by Alison McQueen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apocalyptic rhetoric creates dangerous politics; three great thinkers show how clear-eyed realism is our best hope.
Download or read book Politics and Apocalypse written by Robert Hamerton-Kelly and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2007-11-30 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apocalypse. To most, the word signifies destruction, death, the end of the world, but the literal definition is "revelation" or "unveiling," the basis from which renowned theologian René Girard builds his own view of Biblical apocalypse. Properly understood, Girard explains, Biblical apocalypse has nothing to do with a wrathful or vengeful God punishing his unworthy children, and everything to do with a foretelling of what future humans are making for themselves now that they have devised the instruments of global self-destruction. In this volume, some of the major thinkers about the interpretation of politics and religion— including Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, and Carl Schmitt— are scrutinized by some of today's most qualified scholars, all of whom are thoroughly versed in Girard’s groundbreaking work. Including an important new essay by Girard, this volume enters into a philosophical debate that challenges the bona fides of philosophy itself by examining three supremely important philosopher of the twentieth century. It asks how we might think about politics now that the attacks of 9/11 have shifted our intellectual foundations and what the outbreak of rabid religion might signify for international politics.
Download or read book Apocalypse and Allegiance written by J. Nelson Kraybill and published by Brazos Press. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lively introduction, J. Nelson Kraybill shows how the book of Revelation was understood by its original readers and what it means for Christians today. Kraybill places Revelation in its first-century context, opening a window into the political, economic, and social realities of the early church. His fresh interpretation highlights Revelation's liturgical structure and directs readers' attentions to twenty-first-century issues of empire, worship, and allegiance, showing how John's apocalypse is relevant to the spiritual life of believers today. The book includes maps, timelines, photos, a glossary, discussion questions, and stories of modern Christians who live out John's vision of a New Jerusalem.
Download or read book Killing for Life written by Carol Mason and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can those who seek to protect the "right to life" defend assassination in the name of saving lives? Carol Mason investigates this seeming paradox by examining pro-life literature—both archival material and writings from the front lines of the conflict. Her analysis reveals the apocalyptic thread that is the ideological link between established anti-abortion organizations and the more shadowy pro-life terrorists who subject clinic workers to anthrax scares, bombs, and bullets.The portrayal of abortion as "America's Armageddon" began in the 1960s. In the 1970s, Mason says, Christian politics and the post-Vietnam paramilitary culture popularized the idea that legal abortion is a harbinger of apocalypse. By the 1990s, Mason asserts, even the movement's mainstream had taken up the call, narrating abortion as an apocalyptic battle between so-called Christian and anti-Christian forces. "Pro-life violence of the 1990s signaled a move away from protest and toward retribution," she writes. "Pro-life retribution is seen as a way to restore the order of God. In this light, the phenomenon of killing for 'life' is revealed not as an oxymoron, but as a logical consistency and a political manifestation of religious retribution."Mason's scrutiny of primary sources (direct mail, internal memoranda, personal letters, underground manuals, and pro-life films, magazines, and novels) draws attention to elements of pro-life millennialism. Killing for Life is a powerful indictment of pro-life ideology as a coherent, mass-produced narrative that does not merely condone violence, but anticipates it as part of "God's plan."
Download or read book Apocalypse and Post politics written by Mary Manjikian and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mary Manjikian's Apocalypse and Post-Politics: The Romance of the End advances the thesis that only those who feel the most safe and whose lives are least precarious can engage in the sort of storytelling which envisions erasing civilization. Apocalypse-themed novels of contemporary America and historic Britain, then, are affirmed as a creative luxury of development. Manjikian examines a number of such novels using the lens of an international relations theorist, identifying faults in the logic of the American exceptionalists who would argue that America is uniquely endowed with resources and a place in the world, both of which make continued growth and expansion simultaneously desirable and inevitable. In contrast, Manjikian shows, apocalyptic narratives explore America as merely one nation among many, whose trajectory is neither unique nor destined for success. Apocalypse and Post-Politics ultimately argues that the apocalyptic narrative provides both a counterpoint and a corrective to the narrative of exceptionalism. Apocalyptic concepts provide a way for contemporary Americans to view the international system from below: from the perspective of those who are powerless rather than those who are powerful. This sort of theorizing is also useful for intelligence analysts who question how it all will end, and whether America's decline can be predicted or prevented.
Download or read book Revelation and the Politics of Apocalyptic Interpretation written by Richard B. Hays and published by . This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John's apocalyptic revelation tends to be read either as an esoteric mystery or a breathless blueprint for the future. Missing, though, is how Revelation is the most visually stunning and politically salient text in the canon. Revelation and the Politics of Apocalyptic Interpretation explores the ways in which Revelation, when read as the last book in the Christian Bible, is in actuality a crafted and contentious word. Senior scholars, including N.T. Wright, Richard Hays, Marianne Meye Thompson, and Stefan Alkier, reveal the intricate intertextual interplay between this apocalyptically charged book, its resonances with the Old Testament, and its political implications. In so doing, the authors show how the church today can read Revelation as both promise and critique.
Download or read book Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature written by David Cook and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-21 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although apocalyptic visions and predictions have long been part of classical and contemporary Islam, this book is the first scholarly work to cover this disparate but influential body of writing. David Cook puts the literature in context by examining not only the ideological concerns prompting apocalyptic material but its interconnection with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Arab relations with the United States and other Western nations, and the role of violence in the Middle East. Cook suggests that Islam began as an apocalyptic movement and has retained a strong apocalyptic and messianic trend. One of his most striking discoveries is the influence of non-Islamic sources on contemporary Muslim apocalyptic beliefs. He trenchantly discusses the influence of non-Islamic sources on contemporary Muslim apocalyptic writing, tracing anti-Semitic strains in Islamist thought in part to Western texts and traditions. Through a meticulous reading of current documents, incorporating everything from exegesis of holy texts to supernatural phenomena, Cook shows how radical Muslims, including members of al-Qa'ida, may have applied these ideas to their own agendas. By exposing the undergrowth of popular beliefs contributing to religion-driven terrorism, this book casts new light on today's political conflicts.
Download or read book Apocalypse without God written by Ben Jones and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-21 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains why apocalyptic thought, despite often being dismissed as bizarre, has persistent appeal in political life.
Download or read book Apocalypse as Holy War written by Emma Wasserman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A reassessment of early Christian apocalypticism arguing that the texts are not so much myths about good versus evil as about divine politics and heroic submission Prevailing theories of apocalypticism assert that in a world that rebels against God, a cataclysmic battle between good and evil is needed to reassert God's dominion. Emma Wasserman, a rising scholar of early Christian history, challenges this interpretation and reframes these apocalyptic texts as myths about divine politics and heroic submission. A major scholarly contribution that ranges across Mediterranean and West Asian religious thought, this volume rethinks Paul's Christ-myth as well as his most distinctive ethical teachings.
Download or read book Discourses of Global Climate Change written by Jonas Anshelm and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-13 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the arguments made by political actors in the creation of antagonistic discourses on climate change. Using in-depth empirical research from Sweden, a country considered by the international political community to be a frontrunner in tackling climate change, it draws out lessons that contribute to the worldwide environmental debate. The book identifies and analyses four globally circulated discourses that call for very different action to be taken to achieve sustainability: Industrial fatalism, Green Keynesianism, Eco-socialism and Climate scepticism. Drawing on risk society and post-political theory, it elaborates concepts such as industrial modern masculinity and ecomodern utopia, exploring how it is possible to reconcile apocalyptic framing to the dominant discourse of political conservatism. This highly original and detailed study focuses on opinion leaders and the way discourses are framed in the climate change debate, making it valuable reading for students and scholars of environmental communication and media, global environmental policy, energy research and sustainability.
Download or read book Revelations of Ideology Apocalyptic Class Politics in Early Roman Palestine written by Anthony Keddie and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Revelations of Ideology, G. Anthony Keddie critically investigates the social motivations and implications of apocalyptic class rhetoric in late Second Temple Judaism, including the Jesus movement.
Download or read book Theories of International Politics and Zombies written by Daniel W. Drezner and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How international relations theory can be applied to a zombie invasion What would happen to international politics if the dead rose from the grave and started to eat the living? Daniel Drezner’s groundbreaking book answers the question that other international relations scholars have been too scared to ask. Addressing timely issues with analytical bite, Drezner looks at how well-known theories from international relations might be applied to a war with zombies. Exploring the plots of popular zombie films, songs, and books, Theories of International Politics and Zombies predicts realistic scenarios for the political stage in the face of a zombie threat and considers how valid—or how rotten—such scenarios might be. With worldwide calamity feeling ever closer, this new apocalyptic edition includes updates throughout as well as a new chapter on postcolonial perspectives.
Download or read book From Utopia to Apocalypse written by Peter Yoonsuk Paik and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2010-03-18 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I read Peter Y. Paik’s lucid, graceful, ruthless book in one single astonished sitting. I scarred it all over with arrows and exclamation points, so I can read it again as soon as possible." —Bruce Sterling Revolutionary narratives in recent science fiction graphic novels and films compel audiences to reflect on the politics and societal ills of the day. Through character and story, science fiction brings theory to life, giving shape to the motivations behind the action as well as to the consequences they produce. InFrom Utopia to Apocalypse, Peter Y. Paik shows how science fiction generates intriguing and profound insights into politics. He reveals that the fantasy of putting annihilating omnipotence to beneficial effect underlies the revolutionary projects that have defined the collective upheavals of the modern age. Paik traces how this political theology is expressed, and indeed literalized, in popular superhero fiction, examining works including Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s graphic novelWatchmen, the science fiction cinema of Jang Joon-Hwan, the manga of Hayao Miyazaki, Alan Moore’sV for Vendetta, and the Matrix trilogy. Superhero fantasies are usually seen as compensations for individual feelings of weakness, victimization, and vulnerability. But Paik presents these fantasies as social constructions concerned with questions of political will and the disintegration of democracy rather than with the psychology of the personal. What is urgently at stake, Paik argues, is a critique of the limitations and deadlocks of the political imagination. The utopias dreamed of by totalitarianism, which must be imposed through torture, oppression, and mass imprisonment, nevertheless persist in liberal political systems. With this reality looming throughout, Paik demonstrates the uneasy juxtaposition of saintliness and cynically manipulative realpolitik, of torture and the assertion of human dignity, of cruelty and benevolence.
Download or read book Apocalyptic Politics written by Martyn Whittock and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2022-11-03 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apocalyptic (end times) beliefs are found across different religious cultures and time periods, especially those influenced by the Abrahamic faiths. These apocalyptic beliefs are often associated with radicalized politics and what we would today often describe as “populist” movements and leaders. What are the roots of such beliefs? How have they developed over time? In what ways do they impact the modern world? In a series of case studies—ranging over different faiths, time periods, and global locations—this book explores how and why these beliefs have become so often the driver of radicalized politics.
Download or read book Millennial Dreams and Apocalyptic Nightmares written by Angela M. Lahr and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-10-31 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Religious Right came to prominence in the early 1980s, but it was born during the early Cold War. Evangelical leaders like Billy Graham, driven by a fierce opposition to communism, led evangelicals out of the political wilderness they'd inhabited since the Scopes trial and into a much more active engagement with the important issues of the day. How did the conservative evangelical culture move into the political mainstream? Angela Lahr seeks to answer this important question. She shows how evangelicals, who had felt marginalized by American culture, drew upon their eschatological belief in the Second Coming of Christ and a subsequent glorious millennium to find common cause with more mainstream Americans who also feared a a 'soon-coming end,' albeit from nuclear war. In the early postwar climate of nuclear fear and anticommunism, the apocalyptic eschatology of premillennial dispensationalism embraced by many evangelicals meshed very well with the "secular apocalyptic" mood of a society equally terrified of the Bomb and of communism. She argues that the development of the bomb, the creation of the state of Israel, and the Cuban Missile Crisis combined with evangelical end-times theology to shape conservative evangelical political identity and to influence secular views. Millennial beliefs influenced evangelical interpretation of these events, repeatedly energized evangelical efforts, and helped evangelicals view themselves and be viewed by others as a vital and legitimate segment of American culture, even when it raised its voice in sharp criticism of aspects of that culture. Conservative Protestants were able to take advantage of this situation to carve out a new space for their subculture within the national arena. The greater legitimacy that evangelicals gained in the early Cold War provided the foundation of a power-base in the national political culture that the religious right would draw on in the late seventies and early eighties. The result, she demonstrates, was the alliance of religious and political conservatives that holds power today.
