Facing Apocalypse

Overview

ILLUMINATION BOOK AWARD Gold Medal, Theology

"Using deep-interpretation and dream reading Catherine Keller succeeds in confronting the terminal forces of destruction of our present time with the message of the mysterious and terrifying Book of Revelation. A brilliant work taking the apocalypse in the double sense of the word as revelation and end-time seriously, full of surprising discoveries." --Jürgen Moltmann

"This book plays wonderfully between ‘the overstated and the unspeakable,’ to reveal deep patterns between the world of John’s apocalypse and our own, calling us to the possibility of a last chance for our increasingly uninhabitable planet." --Kathryn Tanner, Yale Divinity School

"Catherine Keller is one of the greatest living theologians and in Facing Apocalypse she opens up that oft-hidden and neglected text of John’s Apocalypse, horses, dragons, and all. By holding the apocalyptic text and the signs of the times in a generative and revelatory tension, Keller makes this ancient text shake and quake our present moment. Read this book and don't be left behind." --Tripp Fuller, host, Homebrewed Christianity podcast

"Of special relevance to clergy, seminary students and non-specialist general readers within the Christian community, Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances is an extraordinary and thought-provoking read." - Julie Summers, Midwest book review

  “When the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” (Revelation 8:1)

John’s Apocalypse, otherwise known as Revelation, is the final book of the Christian Bible and has retained over the centuries its climactic position in the Christian canon. Now our age is threatening its own distinctively “apocalyptic” climax: climate havoc. The synchronicity of the ancient imaginary with our own time gives one pause. But as Catherine Keller notes, the meaning of “apocalypse” is not disaster but “unveiling.”

In John’s first-century text she finds not a foretelling of future events, but an inspired “dreamreading” of fatal human patterns that offers a lens to understand our present reality—and perhaps inspire an ecological and social response that could alter self-fulfilling prophecies of doom.

Catherine Keller is George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology in The Graduate Division of Religion of Drew University. She teaches and lectures across a broad spectrum of pluralist, ecofeminist, process, and political theology. Her many books include From a Broken Web; Apocalypse Now & Then; God & Power; Face of the Deep; On the Mystery; Cloud of the Impossible; and most recently, Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public (Columbia University Press).

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