This sweeping, provocative, multidisciplinary work is a major new interpretation of the
effects of the Christian prophecy of the Apocalypse on Western history and thought.
Through innovative readings of the Bible, theology and philosophy, feminist and
poststructuralist theory, fiction and poetry, Western history, and current politics,
Catherine Keller shows how the concept of the Apocalypse has affected the way we think and
have thought about text, time, place, community, and gender.
Apocalypse Now and Then reveals the apocalyptic links of movements and events as diverse
as colonialism, urbanization, nineteenth-century American feminism, and the current
environmental crisis. Throughout the book, Keller constructs an imaginative
counter-apocalypse that neither abdicates the prophetic passion for justice nor surrenders
to the dooms-end dualisms of the apocalyptic habit.
