Leigh Kimmel’s Reviews > A History of the Apocalypse > Status Update

Nineteenth and twentieth-century apocalypticism, including the Mormons, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and even the rise of the UFO phenomenon.

The influence of the apocalyptic tradition upon the development of the English colonies in North America, particularly Massachusetts Bay Colony and its daughter colonies.

The subsumption of astrology into astronomy, and the French Revolution's anti-clericalism.

A discursus into numerology and the efforts of various thinkers both Catholic and Protestant to find in the Bible the numbers on which the world is built, and thus the ultimate fate of the world and timing of the apocalypse.

A thorough demolishing of Nostradamus.

Having finished the medieval period with the devastating blow struck to the European Christian mindset by the Black Plague, the author now turns to the Reformation, and particularly the growing view of the Papacy as the prophesied Antichrist whose coming would mark the beginning of the End of the World.

Delving into the understanding of the Apocalypse in the early Church, and how that changed after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire with the Visigoth and Vandal sacks of Rome. How the Church moved into the power vacuum that resulted, trying to provide a uniting force for Western Christendom in the face of rising Islam, and how the Church was in turn morally compromised by the power it gained.

The first part of the book is an overview of apocalypticism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, showing how ideas have fed back and forth among these three closely related religions.