Ever get the feeling that things are falling apart? You're not alone. From bad banks to global warming it can all look hopeless, but what if everything could turn out, well, even better than before? What if the only thing holding us back is a lack of imagination and a surplus of old orthodoxies? In fascinating and iconoclastic detail - on everything from the cash in your pocket to the food on your plate and the shape of our working lives - Cancel the Apocalypse describes how the relentless race for economic growth is not always one worth winning, how excessive materialism has come at a terrible cost to our environment, and hasn't even made us any happier in the process. Simms believes passionately in the human capacity for change, and shows how the good life remains in our grasp. While global warming and financial meltdown might feel like modern day horsemen of the apocalypse, Simms shows how such end of the world scenarios offer us the chance for a new beginning.
Now in its third edition, Grounding Religion explores relationships between the environment and religious beliefs and practices. Established scholars introduce students to the ways religion shapes and is shaped by human–earth relations, surveying a series of key issues and questions, with particular attention to issues of environmental degradation, social justice, ritual practices, and religious worldviews. Case studies, discussion questions, and further readings enrich students’ experience. This third edition features updated content, including revisions of every chapter and new material on religion and the environmental humanities, sexuality and queer studies, class, ability, privilege and power, environmental justice, extinction, biodiversity, and politics. An excellent text for undergraduates and graduates alike, it offers an expansive overview of the academic field of religion and ecology as it has emerged in the past fifty years and continues to develop today.
Scott Sigler called Doucette’s cozy apocalypse story, “entertaining as hell.” Come see how the world ends, not with a bang, but a whatever . . . The whateverpocalypse. That’s what Touré, a twenty-something Cambridge coder, calls it after waking up one morning to find himself seemingly the only person left in the city. Once he finds Robbie and Carol, two equally disoriented Harvard freshmen, he realizes he isn’t alone, but the name sticks: Whateverpocalypse. But it doesn’t explain where everyone went. It doesn’t explain how the city became overgrown with vegetation in the space of a night. Or how wild animals with no fear of humans came to roam the streets. Add freakish weather to the mix, swings of temperature that spawn tornadoes one minute and snowstorms the next, and it seems things can’t get much weirder. Yet even as a handful of new survivors appear—Paul, a preacher as quick with a gun as a Bible verse; Win, a young professional with a horse; Bethany, a thirteen-year-old juvenile delinquent; and Ananda, an MIT astrophysics adjunct—life in Cambridge, Massachusetts gets stranger and stranger. The self-styled Apocalypse Seven are tired of questions with no answers. Tired of being hunted by things seen and unseen. Now, armed with curiosity, desperation, a shotgun, and a bow, they become the hunters. And that’s when things truly get weird.
A humorous fantasy novel with elements of the detective genre, Fisher of Devils accepts common Christian beliefs and then does unspeakable things with them Opening in Eden with God demonstrating the use of Adam's unwelcome "quaint appendage," and ending in Heaven with the weirdest party of all time, in between it takes us on a riotous tour of the Afterworld. The rascally St Peter and his psychotic bodyguard St George take on Satan and a bunch of seriously pissed-off Fallen Angels. Devil and Saint have their hidden agendas, but are gradually forced into a dubious partnership. When not trying to destroy or save each other, they have to confront, inter alia: the impeccably mannered Beast of the Apocalypse; bones with a grudge; treachery by Satan's own ministers; rebellion by the original cannibalistic inhabitants of Hell; lovelorn souls in vats in Limbo; a rigged Second Judgement; conscience-stricken serpents; the gurgling (and deadly) Immaculate Infant; the Virgin Mary with her hideous secret. And at the back of both their minds is the memory of a certain woman . . .
Survival is a luxury in the post-apocalyptic world Alex Keener knows. At sixteen, he leaves the confines of Bunker 108, escaping a deadly viral outbreak. But freedom means facing the brutal aftermath of the meteor Ragnarok, which devastated Earth thirty years ago. With every breath a battle for survival, Alex navigates through a barren world, haunted by monstrous remnants of the past. Discover the thrilling journey of Alex in this young adult sci-fi survival novel. Venture through a ravaged world where the past is obliterated, and survival is the only law. Perfect for fans of intense, post-apocalyptic tales and survivalist narratives. Delve into a landscape where the fight for existence eclipses all else. Ideal for readers searching for YA dystopian books, teen survival stories, post-meteor apocalypse narratives, or thrilling science fiction adventures.
The book of Revelation has been a source of continual fascination for nearly two thousand years. Concepts such as The Lamb of God, the Four Horsemen, the Seventh Seal, the Beasts and Antichrist, the Whore of Babylon, Armageddon, the Millennium, the Last Judgement, the New Jerusalem, and the ubiquitous Angel of the Apocalypse have captured the popular imagination. One can hardly open a newspaper or click on a news web site without reading about impending financial or climate change Armageddon, while the concept of the Four Horsemen pervades popular music, gaming, and satire. Yet few people know much about either the basic meaning or original context of these concepts or the multiplicity of different ways in which they have been interpreted by visual artists in particular. The visual history of this most widely illustrated of all the biblical books deserves greater attention. This book fills these gaps in a striking and original way by means of ten concise thematic chapters which explain the origins of these concepts from the book of Revelation in an accessible way. These explanations are augmented and developed via a carefully selected sample of the ways in which the concepts have been treated by artists through the centuries. The 120 visual examples are drawn from a wide range of time periods and media including the ninth-century Trier Apocalypse, thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman Apocalypse Manuscripts such as the Lambeth and Trinity Apocalypses, the fourteenth-century Angers Apocalypse Tapestry, fifteenth-century Apocalypse altarpieces by Van Eyck and Memling, Dürer and Cranach's sixteenth-century Apocalypse woodcuts, and more recently a range of works by William Blake, J. M. W. Turner, Max Beckmann, as well as film posters and stills, cartoons, and children's book illustrations. The final chapter demonstrates the continuing resonance of all the themes in contemporary religious, political, and popular thinking, while throughout the book a contrast will be drawn between those readers of Revelation who have seen it in terms of earthly revolutions in the here and now, and those who have adopted a more spiritual, otherworldly approach.
Many natural scientists believe climate change will bring civilizational collapse. Tim Gorringe argues that behind this threat is a commitment to false values, embodied in our political, economic, and farming systems. At the same time, millions of people the world over--perhaps the majority--are committed to alternative values and practices. This book explores how these values, already foreshadowed in people's movements all over the world, can produce different political and economic realities which can underwrite a safe and prosperous future for all.
Generation Impact fills a significant gap in the impact accounting literature about how ambitions, pressures, and misgivings can be addressed, dealt with, and harnessed into forward-looking programmes for the creation, measurement, and management in social accounting.
Finalist for the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2021 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work - Poetry A piercing, unflinching new volume offers necessary music for our tumultuous present, from “perhaps the best public poet we have” (Boston Globe). In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America’s, and the world’s, experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or the contemporary efforts of Black Lives Matter, a girls’ night clubbing in the shadow of World War II or the doomed nobility of Muhammad Ali’s conscious objector stance, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect history’s grand exploits to the triumphs and tragedies of individual lives. Meticulously orchestrated and musical in its forms, Playlist for the Apocalypse collects a dazzling array of voices: an elevator operator simmers with resentment, an octogenarian dances an exuberant mambo, a spring cricket philosophizes with mordant humor on hip hop, critics, and Valentine’s Day. Calamity turns all too personal in the book’s final section, “Little Book of Woe,” which charts a journey from terror to hope as Dove learns to cope with debilitating chronic illness. At turns audaciously playful and grave, alternating poignant meditations on mortality and acerbic observations of injustice, Playlist for the Apocalypse takes us from the smallest moments of redemption to catastrophic failures of the human soul. Listen up, the poet says, speaking truth to power; what you’ll hear in return is “a lifetime of song.”
How the political violence of modern jihad echoes the crises of western liberalism In this authoritative, accessible study, historian Suzanne Schneider examines the politics and ideology of the Islamic State (better known as ISIS). Schneider argues that today’s jihad is not the residue from a less enlightened time, nor does it have much in common with its classical or medieval form, but it does bear a striking resemblance to the reactionary political formations and acts of spectacular violence that are upending life in Western democracies. From authoritarian populism to mass shootings, xenophobic nationalism, and the allure of conspiratorial thinking, Schneider argues that modern jihad is not the antithesis to western neoliberalism, but rather a dark reflection of its inner logic. Written with the sensibility of a political theorist and based on extensive research into a wide range of sources, from Islamic jurisprudence to popular recruitment videos, contemporary apocalyptic literature and the Islamic State's Arabic-language publications, the book explores modern jihad as an image of a potential dark future already heralded by neoliberal modes of life. Surveying ideas of the state, violence, identity, and political community, Schneider argues that modern jihad and neoliberalism are two versions of a politics of failure: the inability to imagine a better life here on earth.
