The discipline of apologetics has always been somewhat controversial in Christian theology. In the early church, the Greek-speaking apologists were often opposed for their attempts to express the gospel in the terms of Greek thought. In more recent t...
Jewish apocalyptic literature emerged as a form of resistance literature during the intertestamental period. A product of marginalized communities, such literature is highly political, articulating the worldview of the politically oppressed and those...
The Jewish apocalyptic literature that first appears in the Hellenistic period and continues into the Common Era developed a radically novel view of the future. As formulated in the apocalypse of 4 Ezra about the end of the first century CE, the Most...
In this article, I delineate a notion of phenomenology, which differs in many ways from earlier approaches. I term this understanding apocalyptic in the sense that this phenomenology discloses not only the essences of particular things, logical entit...
The purpose of this article is to explore what kind of light apocalyptic eschatology can shed on our understanding of Paul’s argumentation in 2 Cor 10–13. The focus is on 2 Cor 10:3–6, where Paul, using the topos of holy war, descri...
When the apocalyptic is marginalized, not only is theology under threat of malpractice, but phenomenology is also, for at the core of apocalyptic thinking is the attempt to restrain the totalities that are at work implicitly in our social imaginaries...
Deciding what to make of secular, religious, and spiritual speculations about AI and digital technologies can be overwhelming, and focusing on the extreme utopic or dystopic outcomes may be obscuring the larger facts. Is this technology a beautiful b...
This paper is a theoretical exploration that works through a global Indigenous consciousness. As a critically reflexive story work and auto-ethnographic contemplation it begins by confronting a presumed genealogy in a post-apocalyptic world of coloni...
This paper examines the heavy metal genre as a popular form of apocalypticism, i.e., as a warning reminder or “premediation” of potentially (large-scale) lethal crises. By confronting the audience with disturbing, seemingly exaggerated sc...
This article examines Daniel 10 as a key witness to the formation of early Jewish apocalyptic literature. The chapter portrays Daniel as a sage whose encounter with a celestial messenger prepares him to guide his community. Narratively, this scene in...
The COVID-19 pandemic has roused the apocalyptic fear that was foreseen in religious prophecies. This research will focus on the post-9/11 and pre-COVID-19 disaster films, in an attempt to understand the representation and pre-presentation of the col...
Christianity continues to decline in the traditional west, yet is at the same time experiencing significant growth in the majority world. Research indicates that by 2060 the portion of those who identify as non-religious will decline significantly ac...
Through the perspective of ‘catastrophising thought’, this work undertakes a comparative analysis of five post-apocalyptic films dealing with climate migration: Waterworld, Snowpiercer, Interstellar, Mad Max: Fury Road and Mortal Engines...
Waxing “biblical,” Donald Trump has described the COVID-19 pandemic as a “plague.” In a different but related register, millions of Christians worldwide have interpreted the pandemic as one of the eschatological plagues prophe...
In the literature on religion in games, two broad types of religion have been depicted: on the one hand, historical religions—Christian, Muslim and Buddhist narratives, tropes and symbols—and, on the other hand, fiction-based religion, re...
With the present collection of essays reflecting upon the complex convergences and divergences between Eschatology and genuine transcendence, there is perhaps no greater modern Catholic figure to recall than that of the great, German Catholic convert...
Dürer’s Apocalypse was undoubtedly the prototype for the many apocalyptic representations that suddenly appeared in Central Europe by the end of the sixteenth century: the influence of Dürer’s Apocalypse extended far beyond the...
In the early postwar era, from 1945 to 1960, Americans confronted a dilemma that had never been faced before. In the new atomic age, which opened with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945, they now had to grapple with...
The present paper discusses Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains (1969), which parodies both “post-apocalyptic” novels in the Cold War era and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory on civilisation. By analysing this novel in compariso...
The biblical story of the Flood, which portrays a humanity worthy of annihilation, is the fundamental myth used by generations of interpreters as they radically criticized the society and culture in which they lived. Accordingly, the Deluge myth&rsqu...
In what follows, some contemporary narratives about ‘the information society’ are interrogated from critical race theoretical and decolonial perspectives with a view to constructing a ‘counter-narrative’ purporting to demonstrate the embeddedness of...
Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of the leading theologians of the twentieth century, uses the methods and results of classical phenomenology in many ways. Balthasar’s repeated criticism of Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger conceals the fact of his de...
This paper explores recent discussions on the nature and character of Christian doctrine and doctrinal arrangement within leading accounts of systematic theology, that is, the attempt to offer an integrated and cohesive account of the central commitm...
The aim of this article is to approach the epistemology of revelation through the approach of political anthropology. It departs from Max Weber’s distinction between ordinary and out-of-the-ordinary situations, which led to his idea of charisma...
One of the revolutionary insights of early liberation theology was that theological discernment is, above all, a concrete undertaking. Yet this insight is accompanied by a persistent conundrum that arises from the way in which naming God’s acti...
This paper considers how science fiction, and the subgenres of speculative historicism and futurism in particular, might open legal discourse to hitherto unseen and potentially instructive perspectives. It begins with the proposition that recent hist...
Can it be taken for granted that humans will remain in control in a situation where a breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI) has led to our no longer being the foremost creatures on our planet in terms of general intelligence?[...]
Modern historiography has studied the influence of messianic and millennialist ideas in the Crown of Aragon extensively and, more particularly, how they were linked to the Aragonese monarchy. To date, research in the field of art history has mainly c...
Common dualistic thinking in environmental design education adopts humans and the environment as separate entities, with the environment as raw material stock. This approach affects the intellectual development of landscape architects and limits thei...
This article tries to be funny in a very serious way, following Virginia Woolf’s call in Three Guineas that, in the face of man-made disasters, we may have to make fools of ourselves in relation to common sense. Apocalypses, such as the Anthrop...
This paper is an exploratory exercise in practical theology and interfaith engagement that probes the conceptual frameworks of insularity (Islandness) and incarceration in Revelation in order to address the related problems of prisoner radicalization...
The COVID-19 pandemic has produced a social drama in which churches, government, and individual actors have played prominent roles. While neo-conservative evangelicals have resisted governmental and scientific overreach in the name of “faith ov...
Given the prevalence of supernatural beliefs in the United States, some people may believe that God or the devil influenced people to create or receive COVID-19 vaccines. In an Internet sample of 3196 U.S. adults (with many preregistered hypotheses),...
The capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade, the extirpation of various heresies in the twelfth and thirteen centuries, the gradual expansion of Christian rule in the Iberian peninsula, and the mass conversion of Jews to Christianity there duri...
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the largest and arguably best-known branch of the Restoration movement begun by Joseph Smith, sustains a complex but living relationship to nineteenth-century marginal millenarianism and apocalypticism...
Contemporary analysis of the world that produced the Book of Revelation suggests that Patmos was not a penal settlement, and there is little evidence that Domitian systematically persecuted Christians. The Emperor Cult was widely practiced, but Chris...
This paper explores the intersection of personal responsibility, futility, and faith in visual representations of nuclear apocalypse. In two films produced during the late Cold War, Testament (1983) and When the Wind Blows (1986), the protagonists at...
Understanding spirituality as “the sense or experience of God and the way one lives in response to that experience”, Jesus’ spirituality according to Mark may be described as relational and communal, with less attention given to the...
Religious symbols and figures are gaining new life in popular culture. Reinterpretations of symbols rooted in the visual arts tradition are appearing in film, TV series and short audiovisual forms presented on the Internet, especially on social media...
This paper critically examines American schooling systems, challenges their subtractive nature, and juxtaposes it with the culturally sustaining potential of education. We problematize the current tools for evaluating trauma and stress in young peopl...
This paper attempts to meditate upon the transpacific imagination of cyberpunk by reconstructing its literary and cultural heritage. Since the publication of William Gibson’s multiple award winning first novel, Neuromancer (1984), the concept of cybe...
There is a widespread narrative today that, due to climate change, we are living in the end of times. What does this apocalyptic narrative tell us about our relation to death? A peculiarity with the climate discourse is that “we”, i.e., m...
Many modern rabbis insist that original sin was invented by St. Paul, and that it does not have a Jewish antecedent. Instead, rabbinic Judaism explains human evil in terms of “yeṣer ha-raʻ,” “the evil inclination.”...
This paper explores how the series Darksiders appropriates the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and elaborates on them. It reflects on how this reception affects our understanding of the four horsemen and of apocalyptic literature broadly.
Theologians have been engaged in the reflections of the eschatological in the social and moral conditions of the world for some years now, but the emphasis on the indisputable need for an interfaith dialogue at such a moment is evidently absent. Argu...
The ancient concept of the underground is mainly associated with the outdated triadic cosmology. In modernity, some authors such as Dostoevsky and Nietzsche have dialectically referred to the underground as an alternative to the principle of reason o...
The Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement has grown rapidly in the past two years. In popular media, XR has sometimes been described using religious terminology. XR has been compared to an eco-cult, a spiritual and cultural movement, and described as ho...
This article examines the ‘King Jesus Gospel’ concept proposed by Matthew Bates and Scott McKnight, which frames the biblical gospel as a proclamation of Jesus’ kingship. It addresses the ‘Failure Objection’ that Jesus w...
Through a consideration of examples of the AI Creation Meme, a remix of Michelangelo’s Creazione di Adamo featuring a human hand and a machine hand nearly touching, fingertip to fingertip, this article will tackle the religious continuities and...
This paper sets out (1) to provide an affirmative genealogy that shed light on the different forms taken by sacrifice, the origins of its various conceptual layers and the various social practices from which they come; (2) to analyze the initial conc...
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