I'm almost finished with David Dark's book, Everyday Apocalypse. Not only is this a welcome change of pace to what I have been reading for the past several months, but Dark offers brilliant engagement with the apocalyptic elements of many of my favorite elements of popular culture-- literature, music, film, and television.
Dark devotes the opening chapter to defining apocalyptic and developing his interpretive lens for tracing apocalyptic elements in popular culture. The remaining chapters are short essays exploring the apocalyptic elements in cultural icons like The Simpsons, Flannery O'Connor, Radiohead, Beck, The Cohen Brothers, and several others.
Dark orients his understanding of apocalyptic around N.T. Wright's definition:
As a literary genre, "apocalyptic" is a way of investing space-time events with their theological significance; it is actually a way of affirming, not denying, the vital importance of the present continuing space-time order, by denying that evil has the last word in it (The New Testament and the People of God).
Additionally, Dark offers his own functioning definition of apocalyptic as it pertains to perceiving the apocalyptic in culture:
Apocalyptic shows us what we're not seeing. It can't be composed or spoken by the powers that be, because they are the sustainers of "the way things are" whose operation justifies itself by a crowing itself as "the way things ought to be" and whose greatest virtue is in being "realistic." Thinking through what we mean when we say "realistic" is where apocalyptic begins. If these powers are the boot that, to borrow Orwell's phrase, presses down upon the human face forever, apocalyptic is the speech of that human face. Apocalyptic denies, in spite of all the appearances to the contrary, the "forever" part (Everyday Apocalypse, 10).
The book's purpose "concerns itself with all manner of medial that highlights, exposes, or lampoons the moral bankruptcy of our imaginations while teasing us toward a better way of looking at, and dwelling within, the world" (Everyday Apocalypse, 19).
If you're looking for a great book to give as a gift or to read for yourselves over the holidays, this book is small, manageable, affordable, and an absolute blast to read.
Sounds like an enjoyable change of pace from Calvin and Barth
Posted by: Bruce | November 18, 2005 at 07:40 PM