Political Eschatology

Description

Nothing is more distressing to the modern person than the experience of an unsurpassable limit of the calculable. Nothing disturbs us more deeply than incalculable time, unpredictable time--the time of the advent of the unpredictably new. In a series of interventions into contemporary political crises, McGrath reactualizes the early Christian sense of eschatology as the experience of a time that runs out rather than moves forward. In contemporary politics, economy, ecology, and technology, much that was familiar for most of the twentieth century--the intra-generational transmission of religious values, progressive economic growth, a stable global climate, and predictable movements of peoples and nonhuman species across the planet--is ending calamitously. Endtime, however, is not only the time of endings; it is also the time of unforeseeable beginnings.