This book explores Israeli Religious Zionism and US Christian Zionism by focusing on the Messianic and Millenarian drives at the basis of their political mobilization towards a 'Jewish colonization' of the occupied territories.

In this volume, Elizabeth Phillips brings together scholarly essays on eschatology, ethics, and politics, as well as a selection of sermons preached in the chapels of the University of Cambridge arising from that scholarly work. These essays and sermons explore themes ranging from ethnography to Anabaptism and Christian Zionism to Afro-pessimism. Drawing on a wide range of authors from Flannery O’Conner and Herbert McCabe to James Cone and M. Shawn Copeland, this collection provides insight into the fields of Christian ethics and political theology, as well as ethnography and homiletics. Phillips challenges theologians to interdisciplinarity in their work, and to keep historical and traditional sources in conversation with contemporary sources from critical and liberative perspectives. She challenges Christians to engage in apocalyptic practices which name and resist the false pretenses of the political status quo. And she challenges preachers to call their congregations to moral and political faithfulness, opening up possibilities beyond both the squeamish evasion of politics in some preaching traditions and the didactic political partisanship of others.

This book explores Israeli Religious Zionism and US Christian Zionism by focusing on the Messianic and Millenarian drives at the basis of their political mobilization towards a 'Jewish colonization' of the occupied territories.

This book examines the religious, intellectual and historical roots of the Israeli settlement movement through the lens of various strands of Zionism. The book opens with a discussion of religious Zionism, especially through the lens of the teachings of Rabbi Avraham Isaac Kook and his son Zvi Yehuda Kook. The author notes the remarkable growth of a once marginal movement into a rapidly growing stream of Judaism, highlighting its key role in the settlement project before and after the Six Day War in 1967. This is supplemented by an analysis of the role of political Zionism as embodied by key figures such as Theodor Herzl and David Ben Gurion who adapted it into a governing ethos after Independence in 1948. This section concludes with a consideration of the writings of Ahad Ha’am and the role of cultural Zionism. The book then turns to an oral history of the 1967 war and the beginning of settlement which saw the emergence of key Gush founders. Finally, the book concludes with an extended discussion of Hebron from both Jewish and Palestinian perspectives, first in 1929, and then in 1968. Offering new interpretations of Zionism as it impacts on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the book will appeal to students and researchers interested in Jewish studies, Palestinian history, and Middle Eastern politics.

Politics of Fear, Practices of Hope is about the relationship between two hugely influential ideas in political life: fear and hope. How are cultures of resistance nurtured within an environment of paranoia and social paralysis? Stefan Skrimshire argues that grass-roots responses to a politics of fear coincide with an explosion of interest in the quasi-religious themes of apocalypse, eschatology and utopia in cultural life. Where visions of a better future are replaced by the acceptance of a fearful present - a state of 'war with no end' - this is an important examination of the beliefs that underpin our capacity to hope.

Bringing together scholars from English literature, geography, politics, the arts, environmental humanities and sociology, Imagining Apocalyptic Politics in the Anthropocene contributes to the emerging debate between bodies of thought first incepted by scholars such as Mouffe, Whyte, Kaplan, Hunt, Swyngedouw and Malm about how apocalyptic events, narratives and imaginaries interact with societal and individual agency historically and in the current political moment. Exploring their own empirical and philosophical contexts, the authors examine the forms of political acting found in apocalyptic imaginaries and reflect on what this means for contemporary society. By framing their arguments around either pre-apocalyptic, peri-apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic narratives and events, a timeline emerges throughout the volume which shows the different opportunities for political agency the anthropocenic subject can enact at the various stages of apocalyptic moments. Featuring a number of creative interventions exclusively produced for the work from artists and fiction writers who engage with the themes of apocalypse, decline, catastrophe and disaster, this innovative book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the politics of climate change, the environmental humanities, literary criticism and eco-criticism.

The idea of the complete annihilation of all life is a powerful and culturally universal concept. As human societies around the globe have produced creation myths, so too have they created narratives concerning the apocalyptic destruction of their worlds. This book explores the idea of the apocalypse and its reception within culture and society, bringing together 17 essays that explore both the influence and innovation of apocalyptic ideas from classical Greek and Roman writings to the foreign policies of today's United States.

Linking literature from the sociological study of the apocalyptic with the sociology and philosophy of science, Apocalyptic Narratives explores how the apocalyptic narrative frames and provides meaning to contemporary, secular and scientific crises focussing on nuclear war, general environmental crisis and climate change in both English- and German-speaking cultural contexts. In particular, the book will use social identity and representation theories, the sociologies of risk and Lakatos’ philosophy of science to trace how our cultural background and apocalyptic tradition shape our wider interpretation, communication and response to contemporary global crisis. The set of environmental and other challenges that the world is facing is often framed in terms of apocalyptic or existential crisis. Yet apocalyptic fears about the near future are nothing new. This book looks at the narrative connections between our current sense of crisis and the apocalyptic. The book will be of interest to readers interested in environmental crisis and communication, the sociology and philosophy of science, and existential risk, but also to readers interested in the apocalyptic and its contemporary relevance.

"This book offers an academic inquiry on contemporary processes of the search for meaning in life in a postmodern context with a focus on the Israeli cultural scene. Constructing or finding meaning in life is considered to be fundamental in human life (Batthyany & Russo-Netzer, 2014; Frankl, 1963; George & Park, 2016; Mayseless & Keren, 2014; Russo-Netzer, Schulenberg & Batthyany, 2016; Russo-Netzer, 2018; Steger, 2012; Wong, 2012). Such meaning reflects individuals' search to understand and organize their experience in a coherent manner, achieve a sense of their own worth and place (e.g., an identity and a sense of belonging) and recognize the things that matter to them (e.g., have purpose in life). When such meaning in life is adopted, individuals often feel that their life transcends their transitory existence and hence matters (George & Park, 2016). Viewed as a uniquely human quality (Emmons, 2003; Frankl, 1963) which enables people to interpret and consolidate their experience in the world (Steger, 2009), meaning has gained a growing degree of scientific attention within the psychological field. For example, several components of meaning have been identified (George & Park 2016; Martela & Steger 2016), the distinction between search for meaning and having meaning in life has been delineated (e.g., Steger et al., 2008) and the importance and centrality of meaning in life to individuals' wellbeing and functioning has been established (e.g., King et al. 2006; Park, 2010; Steger 2012). The construal of meaning in life by individuals is a psychological process yet it is intimately linked to the cultural context and historical period in which individuals live (Leung, Chiu, & Hong, 2011; Hicks & Routledge, 2013). The social and cultural contexts often offer and sometimes impose narratives, expectations, norms and values that individuals can align with in their search for coherence, value and purpose (Hicks & Routledge, 2013). Processes of globalization and neo-humanism challenge the meaning and security individuals find in their national or religious identity. Such processes appear to delegitimize the national and patriotic bases which grant a sense of meaning as part of a collective, advocating instead an individualistic capitalistic perspective together with the virtue of seeing oneself as a citizen of the world (Navarro, 2007; Soederberg, Menz & Cerny, 2005; Yeates, 2002)"--

This book explores why English Christians, from the early modern period onwards, believed that their nation had a special mission to restore the Jews to Palestine. It examines English support for Jewish restoration from the Whitehall Conference in 1655 through to public debates on the Jerusalem Bishopric in 1841. Rather than claiming to replace Israel as God’s “elect nation”, England was “chosen” to have a special, but inferior, relationship with the Jews. Believing that God “blessed those who bless” the Jewish people, this national role allowed England to atone for ill-treatment of Jews, read the confusing pathways of providence, and guarantee the nation’s survival until Christ’s return. This book analyses this mode of national identity construction and its implications for understanding Christian views of Jews, the self, and “the other”. It offers a new understanding of national election, and of the relationship between apocalyptic prophecy and political action.