Description
Book SynopsisIn 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.
Trade 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
America's 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 *
Table of ContentsPreface
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
