And if you're not following us yet on Instagram, please do at HowGodWorksPod.
Late December always brings a certain mood, a sense of endings of cycles closing, of standing on the edge of something new.
And moments like that tend to make us reflect a little more than usual on where we've been and where we're headed.
But that instinct to think about what comes next sometimes goes much further.
In focus this evening, the glitch that could short-circuit cyberspace.
On New Year's Day 2000, is it possible that we're in for an international disaster?
Predictions about the end of the world have surfaced again and again over the centuries.
Even in my own lifetime, there was the Y2K techpocalypse of 1999.
Fears of the Y2K bug are keeping many people grounded and most say they'll settle for being close to home with family and friends.
Everyone knows failure of Uncle Sam's computers would be chaos.
Glitches in the air traffic control system, breakdowns in oversight of nuclear plants and weapons.
The Nibiru Cataclysm of 2003, where an unknown planet was supposed to pass by the Earth, ending life as we know it.
Like his previous predictions, Mead claims the mysterious rogue planet known as Planet X is on a collision course with Earth, which will bring world-ending tsunamis and earthquakes.
And, of course, the widespread misunderstanding of the Mayan calendar that led many people to believe the world was ending in 2012.
Everyone on the planet is talking about the prediction in that 5,000-year-old Mayan calendar.
World leaders and scientists scrambled today to say the end of the world is not near.
Priestess Star Johnson Moser.
We met her at a Mayan temple performing a ritual with her crystal skulls.
She doesn't believe this is doomsday, but rather the beginning of a brand new era.
Each time, the date arrived, and the world kept spinning.
And yet, despite all these incorrect predictions, the idea of an imminent end never really goes away.
Rapture talk, social media whipping people up again about this end times prophecy.
Just this fall, social media was flooded with warnings that the faithful might be raptured sometime around September 23rd.
Jesus is coming back like this month.
The date is September 7th.
2025 at 6 38 pm.
I am making this video because the holy spirit has put it on my heart to leave evidence for those who will be left behind.
I just had a dream and i believe it was another rapture confirmation.
But you know, i've gotten so many confirmations from god that he is coming back soon.
When you finally start moving up into the air, i recommend that you don't hold on to anything.
I definitely don't recommend looking down.
I've already sold all of my human belongings.
I've said goodbye to my loved ones.
All of this got me thinking.
What is it about the idea of the end times that keeps pulling people in?
And what about the rapture?
Why do so many Christians find it so appealing?
And what exactly are they picturing when they imagine it?
I mean.
The belief is that any second people are going about their lives and then suddenly a large percentage of the Earth's population disappears.
Writer Dina Nieri grew up in a community where this wasn't just a distant possibility.
People expected it could happen any moment.
It takes a couple of hours for people to understand what has happened.
But, you know, it happens across the earth.
Lots of traffic jams and lots of planes falling from the sky and lots of like surgeries that stop mid-surgery because a doctor got raptured and a lot of like empty prams because all the babies are gone.
As an award-winning novelist, essayist and memoirist, Dina has thought a lot about this set of beliefs she was raised with.
So today we're going to talk to her about what it feels like to grow up expecting the world could end tomorrow, and what she thinks that conviction is really doing for people.
We'll also talk to Kim Haines-Eitzen, a professor of ancient Mediterranean religions at Cornell and author of a forthcoming book on apocalyptic literature, about the history behind apocalyptic beliefs and what our modern understanding might be missing.
This isn't a literature that's encouraging people to give up. by any stretch of the imagination.
One of these features that I think has somehow gotten lost over the course of history is this idea of a way to pass through this river of fire.
I'm Dave Desteno, and this is How God Works.
These days, Deena Nyeri makes her home in the UK, where she both writes and teaches at St.
Andrews University. but the story of how she got here begins in a very different place.
So I was born in Iran in 1979, right around the time of the revolution when Iran became the Islamic Republic.
And I lived with a family of doctors in Isfahan, with very strong connection to a nearby village where my father grew up, where we would go every weekend.
When I was I guess up until I was eight years old, Iran was having the Iran-Iraq war.
So I think Iran entered the war when I was one or so and then continued on until I was eight.
But also my mother had converted to Christianity a couple of years before.
And so she was involved with this underground church in Iran and proselytizing, sharing her faith with her patients.
She was a doctor and doing a lot of work for the underground Christian church there.
Why was it an underground church there?
Well, because Iran is an Islamic republic, it's a theocracy.
While a lot of minority religions are tolerated, certainly not all of them, you do have to be born into those religions.
If you convert from Islam, that is considered apostasy.
And apostates, according to Sharia law, they can be killed.
As converts to evangelical Christianity, Dina's mom and her family were in constant danger.
But their new faith happened to put special emphasis on one particular belief that gave them something to hold on to.
The rapture.
The idea that, at any moment, true believers might be taken straight up to heaven at the start of the end times on earth.
We did live in an urgent situation all the time.
You know, we were in the Islamic Republic.
Our lives were threatened.
The leaders of churches around the country.
We saw people being executed for converting, for proselytizing and so on.
And the danger was always there of having the door knocked down and having moral police officers come in and basically put your faith to the test.
And so you're told you should be prepared to die for what you believe in, because that's what Jesus would want.
That's what the first Christians did.
We were living an existence that was very much closer to the first Christians than, to say, the modern Christians in Oklahoma and Texas and wherever.
And so I think that urgency of the threat to your life makes you cling to this notion that at any second you could be rescued supernaturally, because actual human rescue is such a freaking process.
Like you have to then, you know, become a refugee and run away and like, have some country accept you, not just some country bureaucrats of that country accept you, and then you have to sit around hoping that some other government will come in and change the regime and get rid of the theocrats and the mullahs and things like that.
In that way?
Do you think that the idea of the rapture being imminent was something that helped people fight off despair?
Yes, absolutely.
Because I think the notion that anything could happen and one of the possibilities, the biggest possibility, is this you know, ecstatic release from all of the chains of the earth here which are so in our face and tangible in the way that we were living.
So I think it felt very much like something to hope for and look to.
And I think people use it also in other communities in the same way.
But you know, it's just not as urgent.
For Dina's church, the rapture was a way to feel hope in a world dominated by chaos and fear.
But that instinct to focus on the end of the world when everything is in turmoil isn't new.
You can find versions of it throughout history and across faiths as varied as Hinduism, Islam and ancient Norse religion.
As for the specific form the apocalypse takes in Christianity, that has deep roots too.
Kim Haines-Eitzen, a historian of ancient Mediterranean religions, says you can trace certain details to Persian Zoroastrianism and ancient Greek religion.
But the strongest source of influence came from the tradition Christianity first grew out of.
Certainly Christians didn't invent this.
It emerged from within Judaism.
And we have really some of our best examples of what we might call classic apocalyptic thought and writing in Judaism, later strands, later books of the Hebrew Bible, Jewish scriptures, what Christians come to call the Old Testament.
Most of these ancient texts are hard to date, which makes it difficult to know whether any specific historical events inspired them.
But Kim says it does seem as though moments of political or social crisis played at least some role in shaping apocalyptic literature.
One text where we can see that connection more clearly is the Book of Daniel.
Scholars generally agree it was written during a period of real political and religious upheaval in the second century BCE.
In the second century before the Common Era, you have after Alexander the Great's conquests.
You have Jerusalem and its environs being fought over by the Seleucids or the Egyptians, the Ptolemies.
And so you have basically what we would call Syria and Egypt quarreling over this region.
And at one point, a Seleucid king, Antiochus Epiphanes IV, came into Jerusalem.
And for the most part, Jews had been able to maintain their own religious practices.
But he decided to set up an altar to Zeus in the temple in Jerusalem, in the Holy of Holies.
It's part of the way in which we date certain parts of the book of Daniel, because those parts seem to have been written in in response to this catastrophe.
And it was viewed as a catastrophe.
And Antiochus didn't just desecrate the temple.
He also embarked on a campaign to suppress Jewish religious practices.
This sparked one of the best-known uprisings in Jewish history, the Maccabean Revolt, which lasted from about 167 to 160 BCE, and is the source for the story of Hanukkah.
In the face of this major threat to their identity and existence, the authors of the Book of Daniel seem to have turned to apocalyptic visions and symbols to make sense of the turmoil.
So you have portions, for example, of the Book of Daniel that seem to be really articulating a kind of vision, a revelation of what has happened to this point in history, what is happening right now and what is about to happen in terms of coming judgment day, when the courts will be opened and judgment will be meted out for those who've been righteous and unrighteous, and certainly that is the closest like prequel for want of a better word to what then emerges with the jesus movement and early christianity.
The visions in the Book of Daniel were written less than two centuries before Jesus' lifetime and they continued to shape the Jewish imagination in his day.
Once again, Jews were living under foreign rule and different groups disagreed about how much to adapt or maintain their own identity.
In that atmosphere of uncertainty, the time was ripe for religious leaders with an apocalyptic message to emerge.
And according to Kim and other scholars, Jesus himself fit that mold.
In the case of say, Jesus.
When we look at the variety of sources that we have, one common thread is some of his teachings, which seem to center on a coming kingdom of God or a coming kingdom of heaven.
The translations are somewhat different in the different gospels, but some kind of coming kingdom.
What's meant by that?
So that's kind of a standard feature, I would say, of apocalyptic thought at the time, which is there's this age and then there's an age to come.
There's this kingdom, or we're living in the times of this kingdom, but in the future there'll be a new kingdom.
So that's one thing that he seems to have taught.
He seems to have taught a kind of what we might think of as a reversal of fortunes.
It's kind of an overly, you know flippant way to maybe put it, but he did seem.
Coupled with this idea about this coming kingdom is that there was going to be a reckoning in the sense of, and those who have been righteous, those who have done good things, will be rewarded.
Those who have been not you know, not faithful, not true, not righteous, will be condemned.
That idea of a major reckoning isn't just present in Jesus' teachings or the book of Daniel.
It's a common theme across apocalyptic literature, where it's often portrayed in vivid, unsettling detail.
There's a very graphic and violent aspect to apocalyptic writings. from antiquity.
And I would say by contrast to Daniel, many of them are just much more graphic.
The punishments meted out are so detailed.
So this group of people is going to be thrown into a lake of fire and they will be burning for the rest of their lives in that fire.
This group of people will be strung up by their tongues because they committed this kind of a sin.
This group of people will be strung up by their feet and dipped into fire because they did this.
So there's an incredible amount of detail about punishments.
But also, you know, in the way in which they are imagining this judgment day, it is a battle.
In just about every framework that we have for some idea about a coming judgment day, it's preceded by a battle.
And it's framed in terms of militaristic language.
In fact, one of the most common motifs that you see in these texts is the blowing of the trumpet.
The blowing of the trumpet was how an army would begin a battle.
So it inaugurated a battle.
It inaugurates the apocalypse or a judgment day.
Dana has thought a lot about that focus on violence and judgment in her own tradition, in part because of what happened in her life as she got older.
In 1987, her mother got into trouble for proselytizing, and the family was forced to flee Iran.
They spent two years living as refugees before finally landing in Oklahoma, an experience Dina has written about extensively, including in her books The Ungrateful Refugee and Who Gets Believed.
In their new home, the family joined another evangelical church, this one very much above ground.
And while this new community's beliefs were technically the same, Dina's relationship to them, especially to the idea of the apocalypse, started to change.
The rapture had always scared her a bit, mostly because she hoped it wouldn't happen before she got to experience all the good stuff in life like kissing a boy or going to college.
But in Oklahoma, her fears took on a darker tone.
I got more scared of the rapture during that time, like much, much more scared of the rapture during the Oklahoma years than I had been ever before.
And there were, I mean, several reasons for that.
So the thing that felt kind of most obvious.
If you had asked me then, why are you more scared of the rapture?
I would say, because I have sinned more, you know, and there are so many things that were sinful, that were all around.
Well, for one thing, I was going through my teenage years, so there was lots more sinful thoughts.
Another thing was that there was more reasons to defy my mother in this moment where we were culturally separating from each other.
So I was becoming more American.
She was still always going to be very Iranian.
And there were arguments and fights over everything who I could be friends with, what I could watch on television, what music was wicked.
And there was so much messaging around all the ways that you could fall that are not just doing drugs or getting pregnant.
There was all the little ways that you were going to disappoint Jesus, every little lie that you told, every little shameful thought.
And so the idea that I would be left behind became a lot more That, if the rapture happened, I wasn't certain anymore that I would go.
We were also just a little bit aware that the church that we had in Iran were real, true believers.
I mean, these are people who had decided to be Christians and to hold to their faith in a place that did not allow it.
Whereas there was a lot of very casual faithful in Oklahoma.
So there was also this feeling of, I don't know who will be taken.
Whereas the idea there was every single person in the underground church will be taken in the rapture in our church in Oklahoma.
Well, who's going to go really?
I mean, what have they done?
Why are they actually coming to church?
You know, there was a lot of like judginess going around from all the different sides.
The more unsure Dina felt about her place in this new community, the more real the danger of being left behind seemed.
And eventually, that fear started erupting in the form of what she now calls her rapture scares.
If my mother, for example, who worked several jobs in those first years, came home very, very late and I was alone, or alone with my brother, I would get panic attacks about whether or not the rapture had happened.
And I would grab the phone list from the church and think of whom I might call to see if they had been raptured.
And the obvious choice was the pastor, but I was too shy to call that guy.
And so there was another couple who were older and so very kind and faithful.
And so I would often start with them.
But you know, I remember when I called people I would always be listening for children or babies or you know like in the background, the people who would definitely be raptured.
I mean, a baby would do it.
That would be enough that the rapture didn't happen.
With time, the fears that had gripped teenage Dina started to fade away, making room for doubt to creep in in their wake.
Eventually, she lost her faith entirely.
And when she looked back on things from that perspective, she started to see things in a different light.
More than a decade later, when I really tried to make sense of this as an adult, I realized how many of the behaviors and sort of beliefs that are adjacent to this or grow out of this underlying belief are so cynical and selfish and misanthropic and one of them was this this focus on the torture that would happen to the people that were left behind who didn't believe everything that was said.
You know, when we came to them with the good news of Jesus, they turned their backs, even though it was so obvious.
So now they deserve all the gnashing of teeth that they're getting, etc., etc.
And there was such a gleeful sort of feeling about that.
And even if it wasn't gleeful, even if it was like oh, I feel so sad that this is going to happen to them, the focus was there.
You know, the eyes, the gaze were on that.
There was no.
Okay, let's imagine all of the thrilling ecstasies of heaven and all the things we'll get to experience.
That was always wrapped up in well.
We don't even have the senses now to know how much joy and pleasure is available to us there.
And there is nothing we can forego on this earth that will come close to comparing to the pleasures that we'll get in the afterlife.
So let's not discuss it.
Let's not imagine it.
That fixation on punishment can make it hard to stay open to the people around you.
Though Dina is careful to point out that not everyone falls into that trap.
Plenty of people who believe in the rapture, Dina's mother included, choose to live with generosity and care.
Still, Dina's point is that these beliefs can encourage certain troubling tendencies in a community, including a quiet kind of hypocrisy that potentially carries much wider implications.
So you know, I think it's interesting to me how it plays out the paradox of this idea, because if you believe it absolutely literally, that it could happen in your lifetime, it could happen in your children's youth or whatever, then maybe the instinct is not to prepare so much for the future.
But I never see that.
So in the, in the christian community in iran, as well as in the christian community when we were refugees in italy and dubai, and then also in the more settled christian community in oklahoma where we ended up, you know, in all those places they believed in the rapture, but never did it stop them from preparing for their own future, for their children's future.
Nobody said well, we don't need to save up for college.
Nobody said well, you know, i should not think about my career, i should live sort of in God's eminence here on earth while I have this time, because the after will take care of itself.
I will never have to live to old age.
Nobody thought that.
They still had the retirement savings which, if you truly do believe, I think the first thing that should go is any urge to retire or to save for retirement.
But it didn't.
On the other hand, the thing that it gave people permission to let go of was any concern for other people's future, for future generations, for the earth, for whoever is left behind.
Because if they were left behind, either they're unfaithful or there won't be any progeny beyond a certain generation, and so on and so forth.
So I think find it really interesting that it didn't keep anyone from doing the selfish kind of planning and the nesting and the building that would benefit themselves in their old age.
But it did kind of make them stop worrying about the bees.
Dina's critiques point to the harmful effects that apocalyptic thinking can have on people and even on society.
But according to Kim...
At least some of those effects grow out of how narrowly we define the apocalypse today.
Historically, the idea was understood very differently.
This is one of the things that I think has been lost in the way in our modern world, we use apocalypse as a stand-in for end times.
And not just small end times, but end times in all capital letters.
The end.
The Earth, for example, explodes or something. you know, akin to that.
So the term itself comes from a Greek word that means revelation.
What was meant by the word is an uncovering, something that had been covered that then was revealed.
So a veil could be lifted off.
That would be a revelation.
That would be an apocalypse.
So when we look at sort of the rich history of apocalyptic thinking, we're really talking about both Revelation, something that's uncovered, a vision.
Very often it's a vision that is revealed to someone and also the contents of that vision.
So in the original meaning of the word, was destruction part of it?
No.
That's really interesting because today, I think, when most of us hear the word apocalypse, that's the first thing we think about.
That's what we think about.
Whether it's the zombie apocalypse or the alien apocalypse.
Or it's the insect apocalypse.
We have all kinds of terms.
We have snowmagedons here in Ithaca.
That's right.
We have all kinds of language that is imbued with that doomsday idea, even though...
At its core, it meant something was going to be revealed.
There's no question that apocalyptic literature spends a lot of time on destruction.
But Kim's point is that it's not the whole picture.
She says that if you look more closely at these writings you start to see patterns that point to a more complicated kind of revelation.
One example is the repeated use of imagery invoking the ancient elements earth air, water and fire, which seem to be doing a lot more than just wiping things out, especially fire.
So I think fire is one of these, it is in a way the most potent of all of these elements.
It would be hard not to read this literature and not come away with the sense that fire is a really important vehicle for articulating all kinds of things about the present, about the past, about the future, and that fire is this multivalent element that can encompass both a cooking fire at home and warmth and cataclysmic destruction.
Basically, you know, a conflagration such as the earth has never seen before.
So I think it is an exceptionally rich motif, element image that comes up in many, many ways.
One of the things I find really curious is just how much the elements are never talked about discreetly, you know, in the sense that no element appears on its own.
And fire is, you would think of fire and water being antithetical to one another.
Water puts out fire. but they often appear in the same image.
So we have lakes of fire, we have rivers of fire, we have oceans of fire, seas of fire.
I mean, there's fire rains down from heaven.
It's very these kinds of images that return time and time again that merge really, these elements that on the one hand seem like they can't coexist.
It seems like they can coexist, but you're right. they often do in imagery, but even in themes.
And when I think about fire and water, one thing that comes to mind is, in some ways, they're both ways that objects or even the world can be cleansed.
What was there before can be wiped away.
And even after fires, life tends to grow again.
And so I want to kind of come back to this idea of apocalypse being more of a revelation than a destruction.
So was the idea that yes, there'd be fire and yes, there would be the consequences for those who who have acted wrongly or morally, and we have that inversion of those who are not powerful becoming powerful or becoming free.
But does that idea of fire suggest that it wasn't, at that time, when the Christians and the Jews were writing about this and thinking about this, that it didn't mean it was the end of the world, that their life would go on in some way in a new form?
Yes, I think our contemporary conflation between, well, apocalypse means end times.
And in our contemporary world sometimes that's articulated as literally the earth is going to implode or explode, or you know something that will Make all life cease.
That does not seem to be what they're talking about.
In the ancient world, because they talk very much about, there'll be a disaster.
It might be an environmental disaster or political disaster.
There's going to be this coming destruction.
And yet there's also going to be renewal.
So I do think of it.
I have found sort of working on this project, thinking about our contemporary wildfire scene in this country, very helpful because yes, the enormous destruction of these very hot fires simultaneously a growing I think growing movement about prescribed burns that really highlight the way in which fire is necessary to a landscape.
And I think there is this idea embedded in these ancient texts that fire may rain down, but the earth is going to be transformed.
One example Kim points to comes from the Sibylline Oracles, a collection of ancient prophetic texts that blend Greco-Roman, Jewish and Christian traditions.
Sibylline Oracles talks about how the angels are going to lift these righteous people, the people who have been just during their lives.
Is going to lift them through the blazing river, bring them to light and to life without care.
There's going to be this three springs of wine, honey, and milk.
The earth will belong equally to all undivided by walls or fences.
It will then bear more abundant fruits spontaneously.
So it's like the earth is going to flourish.
Lives will be in common and wealth will have no division.
For there will be no poor man there, no rich, no tyrant, no slave.
No one will be either great or small anymore.
No kings, no leaders, all will be on par together.
So there's going to be like the earth will have a renewal. but society will have a renewal as well.
I have to admit in the ancient texts that those scenes don't get the same amount of press that the scenes of destruction do.
So you have to look for it, but it is there.
For Kim, those rare scenes of renewal change everything.
They suggest the apocalypse was never only a linear story about an ending, but perhaps a more circular one about the chance to emerge into something new.
I think underlying this is really that it's not a literature that is about pessimism or a negative outlook on life, but rather a literature that is also emerging from the need for hope.
So one of the features that I think has somehow gotten lost over the course of history is that again, we have to look for it, but it is there a sense of being able to pass through the apocalypse or walk through this destruction.
There's a way forward, basically.
This isn't a literature that's encouraging people to give up by any stretch of the imagination.
And I don't think any of these texts are imagining this is, you know, end in the finite way we sometimes fastly talk about it.
I think by losing that in a way it enables our contemporary notion to be one of apocalypse equals end.
That's it.
It's a final disaster.
That's it.
And I do think we're seeing now greater reflection on whether that is a mindset that is helpful in the sense that is it helpful Even, let's say, from the angle of climate and the environment?
Is it helpful to tell people the end could be in three years, five years?
Or do we need to give that a bit more nuance or create a sense of there will be a way through?
This is not a moment to do nothing or to just give up.
Kim is hitting on an important point.
Research shows that fear can motivate people to take productive actions if they believe there's something they can do to remedy the situation.
For example, if people believe exercise will help improve their poor health due to cardiovascular disease, they're more likely to hit the gym.
But if they think their heart is too far gone well, they'll probably just suppress the anxiety or be fatalistic about their situation.
The same goes for the state of the world.
If the apocalypse is coming and it's the end of everything, why bother trying to improve things?
But if there's a way through the apocalypse, a way to create something new, that changes things.
I don't tend to get prescriptive, but one thing that I do think about is can we notice where we see renewal?
And can that be a kind of encouragement to us?
To me, it comes down to do we let destruction be the only soundtrack?
Or do we allow in and even encourage a much smaller or a more quiet voice that we can activate by noticing new growth?
After a wildfire, for example, some major disaster, how did people make it through?
By telling stories of people who survived, and i think, in a way, that idea of survival needs to be there.
If we're going to continue using apocalypse as destruction, then we want to be sure that we have paired that with all the features of these stories that have to do with survival.
Kim sees a potential path forward in looking for renewal.
Dina also has thoughts on what we can do.
But her starting point is a little different.
It goes back to her earlier concern about how apocalyptic thinking can encourage people to disengage from the world and from each other.
I think the thing to watch out for isn't just one faith, but apocalyptic thinking in general.
Anything that makes people say, I'm going to throw my hands up.
When big things happen, now and a lot of other times in history, it's just been easier for a whole subset of people to say well, we're doomed.
Everything is a mess and it's other people's mess.
The older generations have made this mess.
It's always the older generations who've made the mess, of course, because that's how it works.
And that there's nothing we can do to fix it.
And so as a result, we're just going to kind of sit back.
Either we're going to sink into this faith over here, or we're going to doom scroll, or we're going to be total hedonists, or we're going to throw ourselves into whatever you know small area of life that we've chosen.
And I think the better life, the better way is to not disengage from a part of the human project that is so important, which is community and the lasting kind of our lasting impact on fellow humans.
I think you need to have a stake in this world.
We are made as humans to live lives that involve other humans, not just in like ways that we're used to.
I see some people like living in big cities in such a weird way, which is that they will connect with their friends once every three months.
And that connection is like a catch up or a dinner or whatever, whereas we are made to be involved in each other's mess.
You know to have to feel the stakes of each other's life.
If something's going on with somebody's children, you want to like actually worry.
And that makes us less worried about ourselves, not in the immediate way, but almost in an existential way.
You know, we suddenly start to understand that we exist outside of this body and that we have a stake in everyone's life.
I don't even believe in the nuclear family anymore.
I think, in order to be centered about the whole idea of death we need to have around us, every single person needs to have around them old people and teenagers, and babies and people our own age.
You know we are meant to live in communities of many ages so that we can see the whole cycle of life, understand it and be at peace with it and stop trying to escape it.
Also, another thing we're made to do is to be connected to the physical world, to not just hole up in these spaces where we don't get to feel the air and the sea and the earth and all of its fruits.
You know, we're meant to have a part in that.
And I think if you live a life of daily communion with nature and with other people and with thinking of people long past, it just makes you someone who is a lot less caged in your own present situation.
As Dina points out, it's a lot easier for apocalyptic thinking to take hold of us when we pull back from the world and turn in on ourselves.
But as Kim reminds us, the literature around the apocalypse doesn't have a single inherent meaning.
It contains fear, violence, and destruction, but also hope, harmony, and renewal.
In that sense, these stories serve as a kind of mirror.
We can focus on the punishments and catastrophe in the same way many people focus on the torments of hell.
Or we can look for the revelation, inspiration for how to be in the world as we face the latest crisis.
One way to do that is to stay rooted in community and the natural world, as Dina suggests.
Because the more we stay engaged with people and the places we inhabit, the easier it becomes to notice the small forms of renewal that Kim talks about, the signals that life is still unfolding, still offering us chances to repair and perhaps begin anew.
How God Works is hosted by me, Dave Desteno.
This episode was written by Sophie Eisenberg and me.
Our senior producer is Josie Holtzman.
Our producer is Sophie Eisenberg.
Our associate producer is Emmanuel Desarme.
Executive producer is Genevieve Sponsler.
Merritt Jacob is our mix engineer and composed our theme, which was arranged by Chloe Desteno.
Our fact checker is Joseph Fridman.
The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzalez.
This podcast was also made possible with support from the John Templeton Foundation.
To learn more about the show and access episode transcripts, you can find our website at howgodworks.
All one word dot org.
And for news and peeks at what's coming, feel free to follow us on Instagram, at howgodworkspod, or me on Extra Blue Sky at David Desteno.
