After a slow start, I have become captivated by The Road. Though I didn’t like McCarthy’s writing style at first, it has grown on me, and I think it is especially powerful given the simple but heartbreaking conversations the father and son have, and is also effective in conveying the bleak landscape and the frightening encounters the two experience. Continue reading
While reading The Road at Starbucks, someone came up to me and said, “That book is so boring.” I had to disagree. He was referring to the stylistics and the (he argued) over-done portrayal of “the human condition.” I feel that McCarthy is successful in his use of language in portraying a very real image of a post-apocalyptic world. The monotony of the language, the short sentences, and the sense of greyness that pervades the novel convey a very believable empty, threatening, and decaying post-apocalyptic world. Continue reading
Having never read a comic book before, and not being a big fan of cartoons in any medium, I approached Watchmen with trepidation. However, I quickly realized that Watchmen was far different from what I expected. It was beautiful, and exquisitely written. The intricacy of interwoven storylines and the pictures full of hidden meaning made Watchmen exhausting but exciting to read. Continue reading
Much of what Strozier wrote in this week’s set of essays seemed to respond to my concern about how easily the “saved” characters in Glorious Appearing accept the punishment of the surrounding sinners. It is no less appalling to me that they could simply sit and watch, and even enjoy, the mass murder of most of the remaining population by Jesus – especially considering the gruesome manner in which the deaths were carried out. Continue reading
It took quite some time to get used to the tone of Glorious Appearing. As a liberal New Yorker without strong religious affiliations, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop (so to speak). This can’t be serious, I kept thinking, even though I knew the premise of the series. Continue reading
Over the past couple weeks we’ve alluded to Hitler and the Holocaust a few times. With this week’s reading, it was really all I could think about. Hitler is directly analogous to Carpathia who, in Glorious Appearing and the rest of the Left Behind series, is the Antichrist. Then in Strozier’s essays, the description of how the fundamentalist mindset exhibits violent potentials seems to resonate with Hitler’s actions towards the Jews in the Holocaust. Because of our fixation with the end of times and our curiosity in psychological reasoning, we are left to analyze his actions from a purely apocalyptic standpoint. Continue reading
As presented in Strozier’s essays, apocalyptic fundamentalism has had a great impact on human psychology. Strong Christian believers have experienced immense changes in their mentality, as well as in their attitudes toward other ways of thought. We can say that such changes in mindset definitely alter the ways in which fundamentalist groups approach the apocalyptic phenomenon, and how accepting they are of other beliefs. It is exactly these alterations that have redefined the psychology and malevolence of doomsday culture.
