Customer Reviews

The End of Time: Faith and Fear in the Shadow of the Millennium

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Taking in the vast cultic mileu - doomsdayers, new agers, evangelicals, pentecostalists, fundamentalists (both Christian and Muslim), liberal democrats and, naturally, millennialists (technically, those who await the thousand year reign of Christ prophesied in the book of Revelation) - Thompson's treatise uncovers the historical and sociological motives we have for putting ourselves near the end of history rather than at its beginning. The approach of the calendar millennium has been a catalyst for the current wave of Pre Millennial Tension sweeping the globe but there are much larger issues at stake. Thompson argues that there is a powerful confluence between apocalyptic belief and the universal human experience which allows that belief to fit within the personal horizon of the individual. Our urge to celebrate the passing of time fails to conceal an even deeper urge to escape from it, which is why our celebration of 2000 is set to have a bittersweet edge and a tinge of desperation.

This fun overview of religious wackiness is still surprisingly readable a decade and more post-millenium; you could supplement it with the baggier How to Win a Cosmic War (of course 9/11 was a game-changer) and the specifically Jerusalem-focussed (a hoot, this one) *The End of Days* by **Gershom Gorenberg** Not to be confused with the egregious and 'internationally best-selling' Sylvia Browne's book of the same title - and no doubt innumerable others..