Both Taylor’s loss of “higher times” and Rushkoff’s burden of the “infinite present” help us understand why we’re so compelled by things like the Rapture””or anything apocalyptic. Living in a flattened timescape, we long for moments to take us out of the profane and everyday. In the absence of “higher times,” global disasters and narratives of apocalypse stand in as sacred moments that rupture the monotony of secular time. “Where were you when . . . ?” is a question of almost spiritual gravitas for anyone alive on 9/11 or the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Especially since the advent of mass broadcasts of breaking news, we mark time by shared moments of global calamity and terror, existential pauses that give us transcendent perspective.
These are real if perverted expressions of our longing for the “higher” time we’ve lost, for pivot points in history, for an escape from the present. In a world where there’s “nothing new under the sun,” where generations come and go “but the earth remains forever” (Ecc. 1:4), we long to be part of an unexpected story, to witness something significant. But must that “something significant” be the earth’s fiery end?
Christians of all people need not buy into the prevailing culture’s preoccupation with doomsday. Let the world have its apocalyptic versions of the Rapture””Christians have something better. Surely there are movies to be made about not destruction, but resurrection.
Read it all.
(CT) Brett McCracken–Why are movies about the last days still so popular?
Both Taylor’s loss of “higher times” and Rushkoff’s burden of the “infinite present” help us understand why we’re so compelled by things like the Rapture””or anything apocalyptic. Living in a flattened timescape, we long for moments to take us out of the profane and everyday. In the absence of “higher times,” global disasters and narratives of apocalypse stand in as sacred moments that rupture the monotony of secular time. “Where were you when . . . ?” is a question of almost spiritual gravitas for anyone alive on 9/11 or the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Especially since the advent of mass broadcasts of breaking news, we mark time by shared moments of global calamity and terror, existential pauses that give us transcendent perspective.
These are real if perverted expressions of our longing for the “higher” time we’ve lost, for pivot points in history, for an escape from the present. In a world where there’s “nothing new under the sun,” where generations come and go “but the earth remains forever” (Ecc. 1:4), we long to be part of an unexpected story, to witness something significant. But must that “something significant” be the earth’s fiery end?
Christians of all people need not buy into the prevailing culture’s preoccupation with doomsday. Let the world have its apocalyptic versions of the Rapture””Christians have something better. Surely there are movies to be made about not destruction, but resurrection.
Read it all.