Tom Perrotta’s post-rapture novel, “The Leftovers,” coming to HBO
Tom Perrotta did a really good job with his post-rapture novel—as opposed to, say, the really crappy “Left Behind” series from evangelical politician Tim LaHaye—and now it looks like HBO will be adapting it for television. That’s good news, given how well HBO does, well, everything. It’s sure to be one heckuva lot better than the Nicolas Cage reboot of LaHaye’s fundagelical schadenfreude-fest.
Read about it here at the Hollywood Reporter online.
We hope it’s the band, in concert. But if not …
Movie poster for the upcoming reboot of the Rapture thriller Left Behind, starring Nicolas Cage, Ashley Tisdale, and Chad Michael Murray (For more info, click image or here; For a related video, click here http://christiannightmares.tumblr.com/post/431059301/video-clips-from-rare-1970s-christian-films-about)
And here’s the poster for the Nicolas Cage re-boot of Tim LaHaye’s rapture-porn “Left Behind” franchise.
I think one of the worst things about having been raised in a fundamental Christian household is that to this day when I walk into an empty room and I expected there to be people there, my first thought is still, “Oh, shit. Everyone else got raptured and I was left behind.”
Judgment: A Christian end times thriller starring Mr. T and Corbin Bernsen (For a related video, click here http://christiannightmares.tumblr.com/post/431059301/video-clips-from-rare-1970s-christian-films-about)
This oughta make you giggle a bit.
It’s easy for non-fundagelicals to become confused when discussing the different End Times prophecy beliefs of the post-millennial dispensationalists and the pre-millennial dispensationalists. Of course, that’s not really a big problem, but when talking about the various End Times beliefs, it helps to know that there’s as much difference among the various “Jesus is coming and you’re gonna get it!” tribes as there is between all such true believers and the rest of us, including the relatively-sane mainstream churches.
Now the problem has been solved by Josh Byers, a Christian who likes to make infographics. This quick-and-simple diagram explains the differences neatly. In fact, it’s so good that I might have to buy a poster-sized copy for use in presentations.
Cliff Richard performs the Larry Norman classic ‘I Wish We’d All Been Ready’ (For a related video, click here http://christiannightmares.tumblr.com/post/1387314278/a-performance-of-the-larry-norman-song-i-wish)
A Rapture song from a ’70s idol.
In his 1992 study of modern American apocalypse literature, When Time Will Be No More, the historian Paul Boyer marveled at the peculiar anti-intellectualism of the end-times genre. After World War II, Boyer writes, laypeople took up interpreting prophecy with enthusiasm.Self-taught theologians wrote best-sellers deciphering the Bible’s prophetic passages, self-commissioned preachers set up TV ministries, and all of them went out of their way to rail against the elitism of the seminary-trained professionals who looked down on such pursuits. Indeed, it sometimes seemed in those days as if everyone was working on a pet theory of Revelation. According to Boyer, the rapture craze amounted to a “Theology of the People”—a sort of re-enactment of the Protestant Reformation, filtered through the intensely populist political culture of the New World.
At the same time, however, the doomsday zealots loved expertise and craved credentialing. They showed what Boyer calls “a touching eagerness for intellectual respectability,” piling up great heaps of prestigious-sounding quotations and always carefully noting their own educational attainments.
—“Appetite for Destruction,” by Thomas Franks, in the Easy Chair column, December 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine.
This is a really great short essay about our fascination with apocalypse.
Great piece on the original “Left Behind” movie, which played every Assemblies of God and Baptist church at least once a year throughout the ’70s.
The film had an enormous impact on evangelical culture and shaped its attempts to influence American popular culture more directly through music, film, and books. Religion scholar John Walliss, who has written extensively on the movie and its aftermath, says, “Just as Alfred North Whitehead said that all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato, so we might say that all of evangelical Christian film is a footnote to A Thief in the Night.” This film inspired people from across the political and social spectrum.
Maybe the Mayans were dyslexic?
News that World Bible Society president (and father of SoCal megachurch pastor Kenton Beshore) F. Kenton Beshore has announced that we can “reasonably expect” the rapture to occur by 2021.
Since we already knew that Harold Camping was math-impaired in his prediction of 2011, perhaps now we should investigate whether or not the Mayans were dyslexic?
