I have started to explain what I’m hoping my next trade book will be, focusing on the book of Revelation and its effect on modern thinking about the End of the World soon to come.   I’m tentatively calling the book Expecting Armageddon, and it would roughly cover three areas:  the religious expectation that God’s judgment is right around the corner – for example in the fundamentalist belief of an imminent “rapture”; the secular versions of this idea, that the world as we know it is soon to be destroyed in one way or another – for example, through nuclear holocaust (as portrayed, e.g., in novels and film), and the political implications of these beliefs (e.g., in understandings of the Second Amendment; environmental legislation; and the U.S. support for Israel) (! Who would-a thought?); and the demonstration that all this perspective is based ultimately on a certain understanding/way of reading the book of Revelation, a mode of interpretation that scholars have long argued is untenable.

I’m pretty pumped about the possibility of the book.  But I haven’t proposed it to a publisher yet, so … well, I don’t know what the future holds!

Here is the next bit of the description that I’ve written for myself, based on yesterday’s post about the end-of-the-world predictions of Edgar Whisenant, widely accepted in some circles of Christian fundamentalists, who discovered, to their dismay, that he had been completely wrong in every way.

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Most people find such futuristic scenarios bizarre, troubling, and fringe.  But they are not all that fringe.  No better evidence can come than from one of….

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