Art, Empire, and the End of The World

Public Service Announcement: I’ve rewritten Everyday Apocalypse.

The new title is Everyday Apocalypse: Art, Empire, and the End of the World.

It comes comes out in May. There is, at least for now, a significant discount available to those of you who decide to order it “pre-publication.” To access that discount you’ll need a code. That code is: 15PRE

My publisher—this is a joy to me—is Vanderbilt University Press. Order, if you want to, it here.

There’s much to say about the old book and people who read it and everywhere it got me and mine since it came out in the heady days of December 2002. I was a high school English teacher employed within a PCA organization back then. A beautiful man named Rodney Clapp whose work I loved (and love) was overseeing a thing called Brazos Press. Rodney took a chance on me. For this, I will always be grateful.

To love a person is to love process. I say this to note that, while I was bummed to hear that Brazos wouldn’t print it anymore, I was energized at the prospect of addressing what I now see as problematic in the first version. I do not take the opportunity to revisit and rewrite a book lightly. The escalatingly amazing Zachary Gresham brought the contract for a new one to fruition when he worked at VUP. For this, I’m so grateful I can hardly stand it.

Having said that, I have a lot of affection for the old one. In those days, I had students who were assigned the first volume of the Left Behind series in their English class. As someone who thinks that bestselling book series is and was a form of antichrist, I had a lot to get off my chest and much to say about the psychic harm Christian Zionism does to an individual even as I was getting an education concerning what it’s done to the Palestinian people. Politics isn’t always theology, but theology is always politics. N.T. Wright and Radiohead helped me think it all through at the time. They still do.

By the way, when I found out leadership at Baker/Brazos had decided to take it out of print, I bought the remaining copies they had in stock and drove to Grand Rapids to get them. You can get a used one real cheap through Mr. Bezos’ outfit. But if you want one inscribed with a few words of repentance, reach out and we can come to an arrangement.

But…back to the new one.

“Art, Empire, and the End of the World” is also the title of one of my first year seminar courses. How do you define art? How do you define empire?

We start there and, as it happens, art and empire are lovely terms for discerning behaviors and assessing culture. There’s more than one way to helpfully conceive art and empire, but here are a few quick offerings.

Art is integration. Empire is disintegration.

Art is exuberant seriousness. Empire is militant denial.

Art opens up. Empire shuts up.

Turns out this is also a helpful path for beginning to address content (Big Thief, Kendrick Lamar, Severance, Bojack Horseman, Matrix sequels, more Radiohead, more Beck, more Coen Brothers films, Flannery O’Connor’s racism) that came to me after 2002.

And to be clear, it isn’t just an update. It's a completely different book. Tell your friends.

Thanks for hanging in here with me, everybody. I’m 55 today and feeling grateful for everyone who’s held me aloft. If you’re reading this, you are, I suspect, in that number.