In this major new work, Catherine Keller brilliantly explores the ways that the Christian prophecy of apocalypse - the fiery end of the world on Earth - has shaped Western thought and history. Through innovative readings of the Bible, theology and philosophy, feminist and poststructuralist theory, fiction and poetry, Western history, and current politics, Keller shows how the myth of the apocalypse has shaped our basic habits of text, time, place, community, and gender.

Apocalypse Now and Then reveals the apocalyptic links of movements and events as diverse as colonialism, urbanization, nineteenth-century American feminism, and the current environmental crisis. Throughout the book, Keller constructs an imaginative counter-apocalypse that neither abdicates the prophetic passion for justice nor surrenders to the doomsday dualisms of the apocalypse.