News

It’s impossible to avoid the apocalypse these days. Whether we
encounter the End in the form of news reports on Global Warming, or
fears of Iran getting bomb, or plague panics such as H1N1, we seem to
be living in a high point of apocalyptic anxiety, with horrible
Doomsdays lurking round every corner.

And yet, the End has never been so much fun.  Roland Emmerich released his latest apocalyptic blockbuster 2012 in November, and since then we have enjoyed Zombieland, The Road, The Book of Eli, Legion
and even Al Gore’s dreadful poem read aloud on morning TV in the
presence of a fawning sycophant. Much more is to come, and this is to
say nothing of video games, books, comics, or half the output of the
History Channel.

What lies behind this fascination with the End? Dr. Richard Landes,
professor of mediaeval history at Boston University, is a renowned
scholar of apocalyptic movements who has been thinking about Doomsday
for forty years. He is the editor of the Encyclopedia of Millennialism and author of the upcoming Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of Millennial Experience.
Landes is an exceptionally interesting thinker who applies his
knowledge of past apocalypses to our present fears, an analysis which
frequently informs the articles he publishes at his website The Augean Stables.