The Dove and the Dragon: A Cultural History of the Apocalypse

No Western religious concept has been as socially, culturally, economically, and politically significant as that of the apocalypse. Neither heaven and hell, nor sin and salvation, nor even God and the devil have merited the attention of billions of people in the manner that belief in the end of the world has. Apocalyptic thinking is riven by a fruitful—and at times dangerous—binary between the hopes for a coming millennium when all shall be perfected or of a fiery deluge when the earth shal...