Amsterdam Apocalypse

Amsterdam, Virginia — a small farming community in the midst of a suburban transformation — is decimated by the H16N1 flu pandemic. With resources scarce and law enforcement nonexistent, the normally decent citizens of the once well-to-do area turn on each other. Then the militias arrive — men once looked on as "kooks" and outsiders, but who now have the military resources to claim the area farming infrastructure as their own. And with their ranks swollen by the desperate, they don't stop there. United against the tyranny by Reverend Jacob Craft — a local minister and veteran of the war in Afghanistan — the people of Amsterdam fight back. But with the federal, state, and local governments eerily silent, a new form of leadership is needed and The Amsterdam Directorate is born. Today - Reverend Jacob Craft awakens to a brilliant flash in the Eastern sky, the sight of a fiery mushroom cloud on the horizon, and a world ensnared in darkness by the failure of a susceptible power grid. With everything he has worked to build threatened, Jacob rushes to find answers. But an old enemy waits in the darkness for a second chance. Can Jacob keep the peace and defend his friends from a madman's attack or will the fragile community be torn apart from within and consumed by forces from without? ★★★★★ "Slick, well-executed!" - Steven Konkoly (author of The Jakarta Pandemic and The Perseid Collapse series)

The Spanish and Portuguese Jews of seventeenth-century Amsterdam cultivated a remarkable culture centered on the Bible. School children studied the Bible systematically, while rabbinic literature was pushed to levels reached by few students; adults met in confraternities to study Scripture; and families listened to Scripture-based sermons in synagogue, and to help pass the long, cold winter nights of northwest Europe. The community's rabbis produced creative, and often unprecedented scholarship on the Jewish Bible as well as the New Testament. Amsterdam's People of the Book shows that this unique, Bible-centered culture resulted from the confluence of the Jewish community's Catholic and converso past with the Protestant world in which they came to live. Studying Amsterdam's Jews offers an early window into the prioritization of the Bible over rabbinic literature -- a trend that continues through modernity in western Europe. It allows us to see how Amsterdam's rabbis experimented with new historical methods for understanding the Bible, and how they grappled with doubts about the authority and truth of the Bible that were growing in the world around them. Amsterdam's People of the Book allows us to appreciate how Benedict Spinoza's ideas were in fact shaped by the approaches to reading the Bible in the community where he was born, raised, and educated. After all, as Spinoza himself remarked, before becoming Amsterdam's most famous heretic and one of Europe's leading philosophers and biblical critics, he was "steeped in the common beliefs about the Bible from childhood on."

The Book of Revelation's legacy of visual imagery is evaluated here, from the 11th century to the end of World War 2 illuminated manuscripts, books, prints and drawings of apocalyptic phases are examined.

The Trinity was defined at the Council of Nicaea and the relationship of the human and divine natures of Christ was defined at Chalcedon. Very few questioned the Church's depictions of the nature of God. Two such mavericks, Michael Servetus (1509-1553) and Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), in spite of their Christian educations, rejected the Church's creedal understanding of God and the Trinity. Although they lived in two different ages- the Reformation and Enlightenment, and there is no evidence that Swedenborg ever read or even knew of Servetus- the two men came to remarkably similar conclusions about the nature of God. Each scholar stated that the Trinity does not rest in three Persons, but rather takes form in the single person of Jesus Christ, the visible God. Servetus was a superb scholar in his day. He mastered the Church Fathers and possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible. Servetus tragically perished in the flames at Geneva because of his beliefs. Swedenborg, likewise, was a well-known and respected scholar, philosopher, and anatomist. He dedicated the last thirty years of his life to biblical research, producing a series of some thirty volumes (in English) of theological writings. His work influenced many of the great thinkers and artists of the nineteenth century and continues to be read and studied in many parts of the world today.

Apocalytic literature has addressed human concerns for over two millennia. This volume surveys the source texts, their reception, and relevance.

This is the first study of the reception of the apocryphal Second Book of Esdras (4 Ezra) from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Professor Hamilton discusses the concepts of biblical apocrypha and canonicity in connection with the increasingly critical attitude to religious authority which developed with the humanists and intensified with the Reformation. The Book owed its initial success to Hebraists such as Pico della Mirandola and Bibliander. It was used to account for the origins of Jewish Kabbalah and to prophesy political and religious events: the fall of the Ottoman empire, or the destruction of the papacy. Anabaptists, dissident Protestants of various persuasions, Rosicrucians and Paracelsians consulted it not only as a work of prophecy but, it is argued, as an emblem of dissent, rejected by the official Churches. At the same time more sober scholars, both Protestants and Catholics, scrutinized 2 Esdras with greater objectivity, endeavouring to date it correctly and establish its authorship. This study also investigates the interaction between their views and those of the Book's enthusiastic supporters.

Maternity in the Post-Apocalypse: Novelistic Revisions of Dystopian Motherhood deconstructs the ways in which women novelists have reconceived the post-apocalyptic genre in recent decades through narratives centered on heroic maternal characters. These writers have placed midwives, pregnant women, and mothers at the forefront of their novels, transforming them from the hapless victims of male oppressors to protagonists who are instrumental in transforming the post-apocalyptic social landscape from one that attempts to reconstruct a patriarchal past to one that safeguards, validates, and even lauds maternity as a form of empowerment. In a novelistic future devastated landscape in which human civilizations are shattered and waver at the brink of extinction, women who embody facets of maternity are taking the reins of rebuilding human societies by overturning patriarchal assumptions of femininity, reclaiming intersectional autonomy, and (re)visioning the possibilities for a declining anthropocene.