Apocalypse now? Hardly
Goodbye, cruel world. With a mere 22 days left in the Mayan calendar — pinpointing our worldly demise on Dec. 21 — we should all be getting things straight in our own lives, cautions David Carrasco. He is, of course, being tongue-in-cheek. In Carrasco’s Wednesday night lecture titled “Apocalypse Soon? How the World Ends (or Doesn’t) in Religions of the World,” the Neil L. Rudenstine Professor of the Study of Latin America discussed the historical origins of humankind’s periodic preoccupations with the apocalypse. Culling from Mesoamerican cosmology, the Bible’s Book of Revelation, and the notion of mappo — a cosmic cycle in Buddhism that forewarns of the decline of Buddha’s teachings and social unrest — Carrasco said that “concerns and fears of the end of the time, or apocalypse, have for some time been a widespread, ever-present concern among human beings, and not only in the Western world.” The latest in apocalyptic fashion? The...