What might the recent hullabaloo about the May 21st “Rapture Theology” might tell us about ourselves:
Rapture Theology as Cultural Critique: What Camping’s Prediction Tells Us About Ourselves
Rosamond Rodman in Religion Dispatches
It has been a week since Christian radio broadcaster Harold Camping predicted the rapture, and we’re all still here. As the media has played its role as skeptic, and as religious leaders and scholars have engaged in apologetically-driven debates with Camping, something else has gone without comment. In fact, what has emerged in the fuss and flap about the rapture are revelations not about life in the next world but about life in this one.
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It should not go unnoticed that Camping’s followers headed directly to Times Square (rather than Oakland, say) to prepare for the rapture. Times Square stands for ultimate worldliness, the crossroads of capitalism, the epicenter of corporate globalization. Camping’s group intentionally or unintentionally brought an alternative way of telling time and assessing value to the place for which time is money and values are a matter of cross-marketing, re-branding, and logo recognition.