Perceptions of Apocalypticism in Contemporary Culture

This third sub-section of the first major topic in my literature review. It defines the concept of apocalypticism in contemporary culture through an exploration of the scholarly study of apocalypticism. It is this stream of scholarship that identifies (a) the historical and geo-cultural scope of apocalypticism and (b) the evidences of apocalypticism in contemporary culture. This section concludes with a discussion of the implications of apocalypticism in contemporary culture.

The following paragraph is the last paragraph I wrote in this section.

The American Interest magazine in 2006 assembled a diverse group of analysts, practitioners, policymakers and unconventional thinkers to consider why the future is so difficult to predict and how societies and governments might avoid the surprise of low probably, yet high impact events. One of the products of the conference is a collection of essays and discussions titled Blindside: How to Anticipate Forcing Events and Wild cards in Global Politics (Fukuyama, 2007).

The following comments state what I plan to work on tomorrow. I plan to spend at least 5 hrs on my dissertation tomorrow.

Here I want to talk about catastrophe and suffering and apocalypticsm found in Posner’s essay and then the possibility of moving toward uptopia in Easterbrook’s comments. This source is found in Ebrary.

I need another non-religious book here. There should be some discussion of the co-existence of the secular and religious apocalypticism. See quotes from Blumenberg in Apocalyptic Time and Peter Berger article in the online version of the American Interest. The books on political and religious terrorism also illustrate this. Then I can offer a working definition. Then proceed to a discussion of the pervasiveness of apocalypticism in contemporary culture.

Tune in tomorrow to for a report on what actually happened