As promised, today we’re back to the apocalypse.  Specifically, I’m going to discuss the sometimes not-so-secret glee that some people feel when Everything Is Awful and Getting Worse, because to them that’s a sign that a final, cataclysmic deliverance from evil is right around the corner.   Perhaps the most prominent example of this kind of thinking in American culture today – this “cosmology,” to borrow a page from Robert H. Abzug’s marvelous conceptualization of how religious views thoroughly informed various 19th century American reform movements – is Dispensationalism of the sort most recently popularized in Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series. Read more