TY - BOOK AU - Vox,Lisa TI - Existential Threats: American Apocalyptic Beliefs in the Technological Era SN - 9780812249194 AV - BT877 .V69 2017eb U1 - 306.0973 23 PY - 2017///] CY - Philadelphia : PB - University of Pennsylvania Press, KW - Americans KW - Attitudes KW - History KW - 20th century KW - Christianity and culture KW - United States KW - End of the world KW - Forecasting KW - Eschatology KW - American History KW - American Studies KW - Religion KW - Religious Studies KW - HISTORY / United States / 20th Century KW - bisacsh N1 - Frontmatter --; Contents --; Preface --; Chapter 1. Secularizing the Apocalypse --; Chapter 2. Race, Technology, and the Apocalypse --; Chapter 3. Postnuclear Fantasies --; Chapter 4. Spaceship Earth --; Chapter 5. The Politics of Science and Religion --; Chapter 6. Postapocalyptic American Identity --; Chapter 7. Post-9/ 11 Despair --; Notes --; Selected Bibliography --; Index --; Acknowledgments; restricted access; Issued also in print N2 - 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 Shelley's 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 America's evolving role in global politics UR - https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812294019 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780812294019 UR - https://www.degruyter.com/cover/covers/9780812294019.jpg ER -