This podcast conversation with Fr. Mark Kowalewski, dean of St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral in Los Angeles, needs a longer introduction than usual because it might, at first, seem off-topic. But I think it’s safe to say that within the DNA of the urban homesteading, permaculture and ecological movements is a concern with how the world might end and the possibility of either hastening, postponing or avoiding the collapse of human civilization. Then there’s the fact that a significant portion of U.S. government officials believe in some form of a “rapture.”
Of course there are many divergent opinions on the nature of this end, everything from climate change, to energy depletion, to nuclear war to more fringy ideas such as near term extinction. I’ve always been interested in the stories that our cultures tell about the end of the world and what those stories say about present realities. Behind, on one end, the grim future of Mad Max, to another extreme, the techno optimist Mars colony fantasies of Silicon Valley executives is a ghost that haunts our imaginations about the end of things. That ghost, at least in the West, is John of Patmos and his hallucinatory book of Revelation.
Fr. Mark Kowalewski
- John Nelson Darby
- Scofield Reference Bible
- The Last Myth: What the Rise of Apocalyptic Thinking Tells Us About America by Matthew Barrett Gross and Mel Gilles
- St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral Podcast
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When Prophecy Never Fails: Myth and Reality in a Flying-Saucer Group. Tumminia has been conducting research on Unarius for over a decade – attending meetings, inteviewing members, and studying official Unarian literature and videos. Here she offers an inside look at this fascinating movement. She pays particular attention to the ways Unarians adapt when their prophecies – and particularly their prediction that the Space Brothers would land in 2001 – don’t materialize. This is the first in-depth study of any UFO religion.
