Amsterdam, Virginia — a small farming community in the midst of a suburban transformation — is decimated by the H16N1 flu pandemic. With resources scarce and law enforcement nonexistent, the normally decent citizens of the once well-to-do area turn on each other. Then the militias arrive — men once looked on as "kooks" and outsiders, but who now have the military resources to claim the area farming infrastructure as their own. And with their ranks swollen by the desperate, they don't stop there. United against the tyranny by Reverend Jacob Craft — a local minister and veteran of the war in Afghanistan — the people of Amsterdam fight back. But with the federal, state, and local governments eerily silent, a new form of leadership is needed and The Amsterdam Directorate is born. Today - Reverend Jacob Craft awakens to a brilliant flash in the Eastern sky, the sight of a fiery mushroom cloud on the horizon, and a world ensnared in darkness by the failure of a susceptible power grid. With everything he has worked to build threatened, Jacob rushes to find answers. But an old enemy waits in the darkness for a second chance. Can Jacob keep the peace and defend his friends from a madman's attack or will the fragile community be torn apart from within and consumed by forces from without? ★★★★★ "Slick, well-executed!" - Steven Konkoly (author of The Jakarta Pandemic and The Perseid Collapse series)

The Book of Revelation's legacy of visual imagery is evaluated here, from the 11th century to the end of World War 2 illuminated manuscripts, books, prints and drawings of apocalyptic phases are examined.

In recent decades few Christian themes have attracted as much attention as that of eschatology, or Christian hope. Resurrection, Apocalypse, and the Kingdom of Christ explores the meaning of this theme for Thomas F. Torrance, one of the twentieth-century's leading theologians. This study, the first of its kind, brings Torrance's eschatology to light through an exploration of the whole range of his corpus, including sermons, lectures, and correspondence. It also demonstrates that his eschatology is molded by momentous historical events such as World War II, the spread of communism, and the ecumenical movement. Out of all this, we realize that eschatology is a central component of Torrance's theology--so much so that it conditions his thinking on other Christian doctrines.

This remarkable collection of original essays by a distinguished group of American and English scholars explores attitudes toward apocalyptic thought and the Book of Revelation as they were reflected, over many centuries, in theological discourse, political activity, and artistic and literary endeavors.

This is the first study of the reception of the apocryphal Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Professor Hamilton discusses the concepts of biblical apocrypha and canonicity in connection with the increasingly critical attitude to religious authority which developed with the humanists and intensified with the Reformation. The Book owed its initial success to Hebraists such as Pico della Mirandola and Bibliander. It was used to account for the origins of Jewish Kabbalah and to prophesy political and religious events: the fall of the Ottoman empire, or the destruction of the papacy. Anabaptists, dissident Protestants of various persuasions, Rosicrucians and Paracelsians consulted it not only as a work of prophecy but, it is argued, as an emblem of dissent, rejected by the official Churches. At the same time more sober scholars, both Protestants and Catholics, scrutinized 2 Esdras with greater objectivity, endeavouring to date it correctly and establish its authorship. This study also investigates the interaction between their views and those of the Book's enthusiastic supporters.

The Spanish and Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam cultivated a remarkable culture centered on the Bible. School children studied the Bible systematically, while rabbinic literature was pushed to levels reached by few students; adults met in confraternities to study Scripture; and families listened to Scripture-based sermons in synagogue, and to help pass the long, cold winter nights of northwest Europe. The community's rabbis produced creative, and often unprecedented scholarship on the Jewish Bible as well as the New Testament. Amsterdam's People of the Book shows that this unique, Bible-centered culture resulted from the confluence of the Jewish community's Catholic and converso past with the Protestant world in which they came to live. Studying Amsterdam's Jews offers an early window into the prioritization of the Bible over rabbinic literature -- a trend that continues through modernity in western Europe. It allows us to see how Amsterdam's rabbis experimented with new historical methods for understanding the Bible, and how they grappled with doubts about the authority and truth of the Bible that were growing in the world around them. Amsterdam's People of the Book allows us to appreciate how Benedict Spinoza's ideas were in fact shaped by the approaches to reading the Bible in the community where he was born, raised, and educated. After all, as Spinoza himself remarked, before becoming Amsterdam's most famous heretic and one of Europe's leading philosophers and biblical critics, he was "steeped in the common beliefs about the Bible from childhood on."

Streete studies the political uses of apocalyptic and anti-Catholic rhetoric in a wide range of seventeenth-century English drama, focusing on the plays of Marston, Middleton, Massinger, and Dryden. Drawing on recent work in religious and political history, he rethinks how religion is debated in the early modern theatre.

The Trinity was defined at the Council of Nicaea and the relationship of the human and divine natures of Christ was defined at Chalcedon. Very few questioned the Church's depictions of the nature of God. Two such mavericks, Michael Servetus (1509-1553) and Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), in spite of their Christian educations, rejected the Church's creedal understanding of God and the Trinity. Although they lived in two different ages- the Reformation and Enlightenment, and there is no evidence that Swedenborg ever read or even knew of Servetus- the two men came to remarkably similar conclusions about the nature of God. Each scholar stated that the Trinity does not rest in three Persons, but rather takes form in the single person of Jesus Christ, the visible God. Servetus was a superb scholar in his day. He mastered the Church Fathers and possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible. Servetus tragically perished in the flames at Geneva because of his beliefs. Swedenborg, likewise, was a well-known and respected scholar, philosopher, and anatomist. He dedicated the last thirty years of his life to biblical research, producing a series of some thirty volumes (in English) of theological writings. His work influenced many of the great thinkers and artists of the nineteenth century and continues to be read and studied in many parts of the world today.

This meticulously edited Sci-Fi box set is packed with the selected dystopian novels & the post-apocalyptic classics. The ebook is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents: Ayn Rand: Anthem Jack London: Iron Heel H. G. Wells: The Time Machine The First Men in the Moon When The Sleeper Wakes Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race Hugh Benson: Lord of the World Edward Bellamy: Looking Backward: 2000–1887 Equality Mary Shelley: The Last Man Edgar Allan Poe: The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion Owen Gregory: Meccania the Super-State Jonathan Swift Gulliver's Travels William Hope Hodgson: The Night Land Fred M. White: The Doom of London Series The Four White Days The Four Days' Night The Dust of Death A Bubble Burst The Invisible Force The River of Death Ignatius Donnelly: Caesar's Column Ernest Bramah: The Secret of the League (aka What Might Have Been) Milo Hastings: City of Endless Night Arthur Dudley Vinton: Looking Further Backward Gertrude Barrows Bennett (aka Francis Stevens): The Heads of Cerberus E. M. Forster: The Machine Stops Richard Jefferies: After London Samuel Butler: Erewhon Edwin A. Abbott: Flatland Anthony Trollope: The Fixed Period Fritz Leiber: The Night of the Long Knives Richard Stockham: Perchance to Dream Irving E. Cox: The Guardians Cleveland Moffett: The Conquest of America Richard Jefferies: After London William Dean Howells: A Traveler from Altruria Through the Eye of the Needle Philip Francis Nowlan: Armageddon–2419 A.D. The Airlords of Han (Sequel) Anonymous: The Great Romance Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain: Sultana's Dream George Griffith: The Angel of the Revolution The Syren of the Skies (Sequel)

The Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church condemns in vitro fertilization (IVF) as a morally unacceptable method of human reproduction. But when Father Cletus Nicholas McCarthy is outed in court as the first IVF-conceived Catholic priest, Pope Benedict XVI must make a difficult choiceannul McCarthys ordination without any relevant canon to back his action and risk a backlash from the people, the press, and the general public, or allow McCarthy to continue to exercise his priesthood, thereby indirectly endorsing IVF as morally acceptable. The Mirror Apocalypse follows the popes and McCarthys stories as it speaks to the numerous ethical issues that arise every day in the world of medical science, religion, and health care. While most of the new technologies invented in the medical field are meant to solve lifes problems, often their use can go against the religious dictates of a people and what they hold dear in their faith. The Mirror Apocalypse is a tale of just the kind of moral impasse that can affect such peoplefor better or for worse. Will Father McCarthys situation help lead the church forward, or will the pope have to make a no-win decision about the future? Or will the throes and turmoil of it all, coupled with the demands of all the other problems facing the church, force this aging pope to resign his papacy? Join Father McCarthy and Pope Benedict XVI as they stand at the intersection of science, morality, and faith.