Existential Threats: American Apocalyptic Beliefs in the Technological Era by Li

Description: Existential Threats by Lisa Vox In Existential Threats, Lisa Vox explores the growth of dispensationalist premillennialism alongside scientific understandings of the end of the world and contends that these two allegedly competing visions have converged to create an American apocalyptic imagination. FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description Americans have long been enthralled by visions of the apocalypse. Will the world end through nuclear war, environmental degradation, and declining biodiversity? Or, perhaps, through the second coming of Christ, rapture of the faithful, and arrival of the Antichrist-a set of beliefs known as dispensationalist premillennialism? These seemingly competing apocalyptic fantasies are not as dissimilar as we might think. In fact, Lisa Vox argues, although these secular and religious visions of the end of the world developed independently, they have converged to create the landscape of our current apocalyptic imagination.In Existential Threats, Vox assembles a wide range of media-science fiction movies, biblical tractates, rapture fiction-to develop a critical history of the apocalyptic imagination from the late 1800s to the present. Apocalypticism was once solely a religious ideology, Vox contends, which has secularized in response to increasing technological and political threats to American safety. Vox reads texts ranging from Christianity Today articles on ecology and the atomic bomb to Dr. Strangelove, and from Mary Shelleys The Last Man to the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, demonstrating along the way that conservative evangelicals have not been as resistant to science as popularly believed and that scientists and science writers have unwittingly reproduced evangelical eschatological themes and scenarios in their own works. Existential Threats argues that American apocalypticism reflects and propagates our ongoing debates over the authority of science, the place of religion, uses of technology, and Americas evolving role in global politics. Author Biography Lisa Vox teaches history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Table of Contents PrefaceChapter 1. Secularizing the ApocalypseChapter 2. Race, Technology, and the ApocalypseChapter 3. Postnuclear FantasiesChapter 4. Spaceship EarthChapter 5. The Politics of Science and ReligionChapter 6. Postapocalyptic American IdentityChapter 7. Post-9/11 DespairNotesSelected BibliographyIndexAcknowledgments Review "As a reference book for apocalyptic thought at the intersection of science, religion, and environmentalism, Existential Threats is extremely useful . . . Vox exhaustively canvasses works of fiction, nonfiction, and film, with attention to shared themes and rhetoric. Her in-depth treatment of apocalyptic science fiction, in and of itself, makes this book a valuable resource." * Environmental History *"Deeply researched and impeccably even-handed in its treatment of scientists and evangelicals, Existential Threats fills a large gap in the historical literature about apocalyptic writings in American culture." * Grant Wacker, author of Americas Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of a Nation *"Existential Threats offers lucidly written and knowledgeable discussions of fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, premillennialism, and dispensationalism and brings them to bear on a topic of interest to both religion and science: the end of the world as Americans imagine it." * Ronald L. Numbers, University of Wisconsin-Madison * Promotional In Existential Threats, Lisa Vox explores the growth of dispensationalist premillennialism alongside scientific understandings of the end of the world and contends that these two allegedly competing visions have converged to create an American apocalyptic imagination. Long Description Americans have long been enthralled by visions of the apocalypse. Will the world end through nuclear war, environmental degradation, and declining biodiversity? Or, perhaps, through the second coming of Christ, rapture of the faithful, and arrival of the Antichrist--a set of beliefs known as dispensationalist premillennialism? These seemingly competing apocalyptic fantasies are not as dissimilar as we might think. In fact, Lisa Vox argues, although these secular and religious visions of the end of the world developed independently, they have converged to create the landscape of our current apocalyptic imagination. In Existential Threats , Vox assembles a wide range of media--science fiction movies, biblical tractates, rapture fiction--to develop a critical history of the apocalyptic imagination from the late 1800s to the present. Apocalypticism was once solely a religious ideology, Vox contends, which has secularized in response to increasing technological and political threats to American safety. Vox reads texts ranging from Christianity Today articles on ecology and the atomic bomb to Dr. Strangelove , and from Mary Shelleys The Last Man to the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, demonstrating along the way that conservative evangelicals have not been as resistant to science as popularly believed and that scientists and science writers have unwittingly reproduced evangelical eschatological themes and scenarios in their own works. Existential Threats argues that American apocalypticism reflects and propagates our ongoing debates over the authority of science, the place of religion, uses of technology, and Americas evolving role in global politics. Review Quote "Voxs study shows extensive research, and she analyzes a huge collection of materials ranging over a century and a half, including fiction and non-fiction literature as well as movies and other media . . . [R]eaders will find much to take away in this fulsome study of American cultural history."-- Technology and Culture Promotional "Headline" In Existential Threats , Lisa Vox explores the growth of dispensationalist premillennialism alongside scientific understandings of the end of the world and contends that these two allegedly competing visions have converged to create an American apocalyptic imagination. Excerpt from Book Preface I grew up during the Reagan era in a Southern Baptist stronghold--the suburbs of Memphis--where dispensationalist premillennialism bathed my childhood in apocalyptic anxiety. I worried about being "left behind" long before Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins wrote their series of novels under that title. In college and graduate school at the turn of the millennium, I discovered the extent to which nonevangelicals found it difficult to take such ideas seriously, which surprised me because I knew so many people for whom those ideas constituted a compelling reality. But my surprise was also because the dispensationalist concepts of the Rapture, societal decline, and an Antichrist never seemed that far afield from American culture to me, either as a child living in that milieu or as an adult working in the academy. I became interested in explaining the power of conservative evangelical beliefs about the end-times and understanding how they came to be. This book is the result. Existential Threats explores how dispensationalist premillennialism emerged alongside a scientific understanding of the end of the world during the late nineteenth century and how these two allegedly competing visions of the world have dominated American cultural conversations about the future since 1945. During my 1980s childhood, fearing a nuclear war with the Soviets and worrying about the rise of the Antichrist didnt seem contradictory, though the adult purveyors of those two visions viewed each other with disdain. When we look at the history and development of the two worldviews, their similarities outshine their differences. Apocalyptic writers and commentators have acknowledged the similarities between dispensational premillennialism and scientific apocalypticism at times, but by the new millennium, proponents of each saw the other as knowingly dealing in false ideas. The end of the Cold War in 1991 was supposed to end conflicts over big ideas, proving that secular democratic capitalism was, as the political scientist Francis Fukuyama put it, "the end of history." What a shock for secular Westerners that the even older wars of religion were not over. When 9/11 awakened the West to religiously fueled rage from the East, premillennialists incorporated the emergence of Islamic terrorism into their worldviews far more easily since they believed that the final battle of Armageddon would be the ultimate religious conflict. Liberal Americans struggled to balance a fear of Islamic terrorism with their ideals of tolerance and diversity. Some liberals, like conservatives, have since concluded that Islam itself is incompatible with Western ideals, but more often they have decided that a faulty reading of Islam or fundamentalist versions of religion in general is the problem. At its most extreme, this argument says rid the world of supernaturalism and we will all live happily together Star Trek -style on Spaceship Earth until the computers become sentient and either kill us or translate our spirits from our bodies into 0s and 1s for eternity. Does that last bit seem far-fetched to you? Conservative evangelicals are not the only ones confronted with doubt or even ridicule for their beliefs about the destiny of humankind. Though we lack a scientific understanding of human consciousness, prominent figures in science and technology, such as Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Steve Wozniak, have warned that the development of artificial intelligence could lead to human extinction. Musk labeled smart computers as "our biggest existential threat" on a list that most recently includes climate change, species extinction, pandemics, and asteroid impacts. Judging the likelihood of such scenarios is not the goal of my work. I do not treat science as a mere social construction, nor do I deny the reality of existential threats like climate change facing us today. Rather, my narrative describes how over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Americans interpreted scientific and technological threats to humanity through an eschatological framework by using the languages of science and religion. The eschatological ideas monopolizing twenty-first-century American culture originated in the late nineteenth century. The theory of evolution as articulated by Charles Darwin provided the underpinnings for one scenario, while the other emerged among the conservative evangelicals who adopted a systematic version of Bible prophecy known as dispensational premillennialism. Contemporaries advanced the notion that these two understandings of the world diametrically opposed each other, a view that American scholars formally proclaimed in two histories: John William Drapers History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science in 1874 and Andrew Dickson Whites History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom in 1896. These two works promoted the idea that there was an unbridgeable rift between religion and science that dated back centuries. Modern scholars have largely rejected this thesis, sometimes called the "conflict thesis." Ronald L. Numbers, a historian of science who has written on the American historiography of this idea, complains that the warfare metaphor has disguised the complexities of the relationship between religion and science while unfairly maligning the former. Historians have shown that the usage of the terms "science" and "religion" to indicate discrete categories of human activity disguises how Westerners historically conducted investigations into the natural world and God in concert. Over the course of the 1800s, a wide range of partisans debated the origins of life as well as the ages of the Earth and the universe. As participants in these debates staked out their positions, especially regarding the role of God in these matters, they sought to differentiate themselves. Our inheritance from those disputes includes a vocabulary with terms like objectivity, technology, and the scientific method in addition to a categorization of bodies of knowledge and activities as distinct from one another, such as science, religion, theology, and technology. Americans dont live as if science and religion are separate, nonoverlapping spheres, as the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould characterized the science-and-religion relationship in 1999. Neither do most people stagger around awkwardly in a permanent state of cognitive dissonance because they hold beliefs, at times contradictory, drawn from a variety of religious, scientific, and cultural sources. Perhaps, then, we should show no astonishment that an American history of ideas about the destiny of humanity since the late nineteenth century reveals similarities between scientific and religious visions of the End. This holds true even for science devotees who increasingly believed conservative evangelicals were dangerously antiscience and for conservative evangelicals who, by the end of the twentieth century, promoted the charge that scientists and their sympathizers actively deceive the public about threats like climate change. That dispensational premillennialism in particular offers insight into understanding how scientists developed their own views about the future is a testament to what we can learn from subjecting both to the same historical analysis. For their part, far from challenging or failing to respect science, premillennialists have integrated scientific conclusions into biblical interpretations. Hewing to an older paradigm stressing that a lone scientist can conduct investigations into nature that prove Truth, dispensational premillennialists have continuously bolstered their biblical interpretations with reference to scientific figures, ideas, and works. Nor have scientific apocalypticists only engaged issues that fall strictly into the territory of what repeated experimentation and observation can determine. As they faced the threats they feared would cause the end of the world, scientific apocalypticists addressed matters such as the most ethical way to live and the purpose of human existence. When there appeared to be conflict between the two apocalyptics, scientific apocalypticists were the ones who initiated it by painting premillennialists in an unflattering light. In the 1990s, more premillennialists began to question the science behind environmentalism, but they did so in the context of both scientists and the wider public contesting the idea of infallible scientific authority. In an analysis of nonfiction, novels, short stories, and films produced between the nineteenth century and the present day, I uncover rhetorical and thematic similarities between dispensational premillennialism and scientific apocalyptic beliefs, showing they are concerned with the same fundamental questions about the meaning of life and the fate of humankind. Science did not necessarily produce different, more realistic, or more rational responses to global problems; rather, both fields offered similar scenarios and solutions to man-made, existential threats emanating from technological developments for much of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The way Americans face existential threats today is indebted to the related histories and similarities between religion and science. In the nineteenth century, the scientific apocalyptic was new and less like a religious apocalyptic at that time than at any other period since. Initial scientific apocalyptic musings wondered how nature could effect the end of the world. Soon, however, scientific apocalypticists wondered how humans could cause the end of the world or of the species; as they speculated on a man-made apocalypse, they adopted premillennial language and scenarios. Each apocalyptic during this period described a perpetual sense of crisis because of an impending catastrophe caused by human action. That the rhe Details ISBN0812249194 Author Lisa Vox Year 2017 ISBN-10 0812249194 ISBN-13 9780812249194 Format Hardcover Pages 288 Language English Media Book Imprint University of Pennsylvania Press Subtitle American Apocalyptic Beliefs in the Technological Era Place of Publication Pennsylvania Country of Publication United States Short Title Existential Threats Publication Date 2017-07-03 UK Release Date 2017-07-03 AU Release Date 2017-07-03 NZ Release Date 2017-07-03 US Release Date 2017-07-03 Publisher University of Pennsylvania Press Alternative 9780812294019 DEWEY 202.3 Audience Tertiary & Higher Education We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:126569164;

Price: 108.94 AUD

Location: Melbourne

End Time: 2025-01-31T15:54:01.000Z

Shipping Cost: 12 AUD