Hope in Dark Times: The Eschatological & Apocalyptic Imaginations (CT3820Y)

Content

Soon after the victory of Donald Trump in the U.S.A. presidential election a pavement advertisement board outside a bookshop read: “Dystopian fiction now found in the political history section”. Is a global conversation now even possible? Are we doomed to the trauma of a violent despair? Is hope nothing more than nostalgia?
This unit addresses a range of issues relating to hope, hopelessness, and despair, while seeking to understand and critically engage them through the history of Christian eschatological and apocalyptic thought. Beliefs and practices are inseparable which entails that practices of hope can be fruitfully examined in conjunction with critical analysis of the beliefs that ground and shape them.

Learning outcomes

Unit sequence

UG - Either an UG level 1 AP or CT unit

Pedagogy

Mixed mode – Face-to-face, online, blended learning, flipped classrooms

Indicative Bibliography

• Agamben, Giorgio, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).
  
• Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1958).
  
• Braidotti, Rosi, The Posthuman (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2013).
  Connolly, William, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017).
  
• Eagleton, Terry, Hope Without Optimism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015).
  
• Northcott, Michael, An Angel Directs the Storm: Apocalyptic Religion and American Empire (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2004).
  
• Gray, John, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (London: Penguin Books, 2007).
  
• Hauerwas, Stanley, Approaching the End: Eschatological Reflections on Church, Politics, and Life (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2013).
  
• Jameson, Frederic, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London and New York: Verso, 2005).
  
• Keller, Catherine, Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005).
• McDowell, John, Theology and the Globalized Present: Feasting in the Presence of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019).
  
• McDowell, John (ed.), ‘Hope in Dark Times’, special issue of Religions (2019-20), https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/special_issues/times.
  
• McDowell, John and Kirkland, Scott, Eschatology: Christian Hope, Guides to Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018).
  
• Mühling, Marcus, trans. Jennifer Adams-Maßmann and David Andrew Gilland, T&T Handbook of Christian Eschatology (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2015).
  
• Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).
  
• Polkinghorne, John and Welker, Michael (eds.), The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology (Harrisburg, Penn.: Trinity Press International, 2000)
• Schwarz, Hans, Eschatology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2000).
  
• Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press, 2007).
  
• Walls, Jerry L., The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Assessment