Left Behind, pp. 104-105 Remember that whole "rapture" thing? Yeah, well, we're done with that now. Left Behind is often described as a novel about the rapture and what happens afterward, but that's not really accurate. It's a novel about a whole series of events supposedly prophesied. These events are familiar to all adherents of the premillennial dispensational "prophecy" perspective. First the believers and innocents will be raptured. Then the Antichrist will rise. Then comes a series of judgments —... Read more

Left Behind, pp. 102-104 These pages find Rayford Steele on the edge of a spiritual crisis. Steele thinks of himself as a man's man, self-reliant, capable and proud. Here, for the first time, he begins to experience self-doubt: Would it mean admitting that he didn't know everything? That he had relied on himself and that now he felt stupid and weak and worthless? He could admit that. After a lifetime of achieving, of excelling, of being better than most and... Read more

Left Behind, pp. 101-104 I've previously joked about how the Left Behind series is "Pretrib Porno" because of its fetishistic appeal for followers of that kinky eschatology, And we've frequently noted how the characters' names — Buck, Steele, Dirk — seem drawn from the adult section of the local video store. But there's another sense, joking aside, in which these books truly are pornographic: they contain spiritually explicit scenes of graphic religious conversion. Religious ecstasy, like sexual ecstasy, is difficult... Read more

OK, so I'm headed out of town for a few days, causing a regrettable delay in this week's installment of Left Behind Fridays. Hope to have it up here by Saturday evening. Until then, here's a provocative little passage from David Dark on the subject of apocalyptic literature (from the introduction of what turns out to be a review of Radiohead's "OK Computer"): "As a literary genre, 'apocalyptic' is a way of investing space-time events with their theological significance; it... Read more