When His disciples asked Him how they would know when the end of the world was arriving, Christ told them, “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”

We live in a world full of wars and rumors of wars, which means we’re not all that different from any previous generation. But the source of our rumors is different: Our fiction and pop culture is shot through with visions of the end of the world, with apocalypses of various sorts. Our guests today on Christian Humanist Profiles have written a book cataloguing and explicating these apocalypses, pulling back the veil and revealing what they mean about the anxieties and rituals of our ostensibly secular age. That book is now available from Eerdman’s; its called How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith, and Politics at the End of the World. Its authors are Robert Joustra, who is the director of the Centre for Christian Scholarship and an assistant professor of international studies at Redeemer University College in Ancaster Ontario; and Alissa Wilkinson, an assistant professor of English and humanities at The King’s College in Manhattan.