This fascinating history surveys apocalyptic religion through time, setting it within a political and social context.
End-Timers: Three Thousand Years of Waiting for Judgment Day examines the high and low points of millennial expectation across the centuries. It shows how and why such beliefs first developed in antiquity, and it explores how end-timers influenced events as varied as the persecutions of Hellenistic ruler Antiochus Epiphanes and Roman Emperor Nero, the Crusades, the settlement of North America, and the 20th-century debacles at Jonestown and Waco.
Suggesting that anyone who wishes to understand the Middle East today needs to penetrate the background of modern fundamentalism within the three Semitic religions, the author illuminates the part played by Christian Zionists in promoting the return of the Jews to the "promised land" and the resulting formation of the state of Israel, as well as subsequent fundamentalist reactions within both Judaism and Islam. He also follows the birth of the "Christian Right" in 19th-century Britain and its development and growing influence in the United States. Finally, the book examines how religious end-timers confront the four horsemen of the 21st-century apocalypse: world population increase, depletion of natural resources, advanced weaponry, and global warming.

End-Timers: Three Thousand Years of Waiting for Judgment Day

Religion & Spirituality

Ballard, Martin

Christian Books & Bibles

Praeger

The age of progress, 1848-1866; (Era histories)

Education & Teaching

Schools & Teaching

Methuen Educational

The story of Christian missionaries in Africa is an extraordinary one, a central drama of cultural encounter unfolding over two hundred years and profoundly changing Africa in the process. It is also the story of thousands of individual men and women from Europe and the USA, and of millions of Africans, whose lives were altered. Central to the story is the Christian faith, the ways in which missionaries took it to Africa, and the ways in which the Africans accepted (or rejected) it. But missionising had a much broader impact than the religious one, relating to travel and exploration, medical care, education and imperialism. Also bound up in the story are issues of race (and racism), commerce, politics and warfare.
Although there have been scholarly works on parts of the story, this is the first general history, and the first history to provide a broad sweep. The documentary record is very rich, and the author has drawn on many texts, of and about missionaries. A preface outlines European contact with Africa prior to 1700 (including Jesuit travel in Ethiopia), but the narrative proper begins with the earliest attempts by German and English Protestant missionary societies to set up missions in West Africa, a strategy which related to the end of slavery and the notion of repatriation for ex-slaves. Subsequent chapters examine the activities of a whole range of other societies in different parts of Africa. Throughout, the narrative returns to the key themes of religion, race, culture and commerce played out in the arenas of conversion, education and medical care.

White Men's God: The Extraordinary Story of Missionaries in Africa

History

Africa

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