> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://mereorthodoxy.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Apocalypse Now - URL: https://mereorthodoxy.com/apocalypse-now/ - Published: 2026-09-09T11:00:53.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-09T11:00:52.000Z - Description: Park thinks that apocalypse can tuck us deeper into the world, like the dead who are buried in the natural cemeteries she describes. But she cannot hold onto the belief that accompanied this vision for burying the dead. - Author: Mere Orthodoxy - Tags: Kirsten Sanders, Book Reviews, Culture, Technology, Journal, Summer 2026 **Martha Park,** [***World Without End*: *Essays on Apocalypse and After***](https://www.amazon.com/World-Without-End-Essays-Apocalypse/dp/B0D7QPYHPP?ref=mereorthodoxy.com)**. Hub City Press, 2025\. $24.00\. 240 pp.** “The oceans are burning. The deserts are flooding. UFOs are real, according to Congress, and glaciers are turning to liquid. There’s also the threat of nuclear war, regular war, and according to scientists we’re in the midst of the sixth great extinction. What better moment in human history than now to take a big, long celebratory drink or five?” So writes Jennifer McCartney in opening her 2025 book, *Cocktails for the Apocalypse*. This tongue-in-cheek collection of cocktail recipes makes no attempt to give a serious answer to the problems of the day. But it only exists because there are a lot of people who get the reference, creating a market for such a book. If the oceans are on fire and the world has been destroyed, why shouldn’t we make a drink and wait for the end to come? Everyone, it seems, is talking—and writing—about the end of the world. Consider *Theology for the End of the World* (by Marika Rose, 2023), *Making a Life at the End of the World* (Lisa Wells, 2021), or *Coming of Age at the End of the World* (Daniel Sherrell, 2021). Or maybe *The End of the World is Just the Beginning* (Peter Zeihan, 2022). Or the *Ends of the World* (Peter Brannen, 2022). Or *The World of The End* (David Jeremiah, 2022). There is *The Beginning \[that\] Comes After the End* (Rebecca Solnit, 2026). Or just *The End of the World* (Ernesto de Martino 1908-1965, who got an early jump on the topic. His book was translated in 2023). This publishing trend unveils a great interest in “the end of the world”—whatever each author means by this. But which world is ending? How do we know? And what on earth are we to do about it? Climate activism especially invites this sort of apocalypticism. Mara van der Lugt’s *Hopeful Pessmisim* addresses this penchant and pushes back on climate pessimism. Though things are bad, she suggests we should still act as if there is hope, even if there isn’t. Van der Lugt’s book identifies an important thread. It is a philosophical, theological, and psychological knot that goes like this. If the situation is truly hopeless, then people will stop trying to improve it. False hope is bad, but *no* hope might be worse. It can encourage apathy and disengagement, the sorts of behaviors that make bad situations snowball into catastrophic ones. How, then, can we live so that we engage with the world we have if the world really *is* falling apart? How can we motivate people to do the things humans do—make love and have babies, make art and work to better the world—if they are persuaded that the world is ending soon? Do you need to love the world to live well in it? These are good questions. I’m inclined to think, put together, that they might be *the* theological questions of our day. Christians have to answer them, though sometimes they seem to skip them instead. Our forms of life have too often mimicked the tone of the secular world, listing all the terrible things that might soon be lost, and not taking stock of the graces that remain. It is not even graces, to be clear. It is the sorts of things that a simple observation of the world might remind us of—the flower bulbs that show up in spring, chipmunks that dig them up and hoard them under chicken wire in the shed, the lichen that forms on trees, the pleasures of a good meal, or playing cards with a child. Frankly, we too often live in the world apologetically, like we don’t want to be a bother, really. We’ll just stay here a minute and not touch anything. Christian hope, it is true, is not confident ownership or even the ease of a renter with a good landlord. It works and tidies even as it sets down to rest. It is passionate about maintenance. It resists both optimism and despair—a heady feat, given the constant temptations to the latter. Despair, though not an unforgivable sin, certainly prevails against a Christian belief in a God who is somehow working, against all odds, to make all things new. Christian apocalypticism is often assumed to be a belief in an imminent, dramatic ending of the world, a not-to-be-missed pyrotechnic display of rupture and separation, of wailing and also of restoration. But though apocalyptic literature implies an ending, what makes Christian apocalypse distinct is that it brings with it the promise of a beginning. The ending is inextricably tied to a beginning that is promised just outside the frame. As far as I can put the pieces together, Christianity without these impossible things is a panacea, a warm bit of milk to soothe the stomach. It might make us feel better, temporarily, but its logic—hope without resurrection—is little more than a bit of comfort. The best it can do is soothe us as we continue on in the same direction we’ve been going. But I have to say this is true only “as far as I can put the pieces together,” because I’ve never been one of these kinds of Christians. I’ve spent a good bit of time adjacent to them. But to qualify that I believe in God, but don’t believe some of the harder things–resurrection, for instance, or eternal life–has never seemed worth the mental gymnastics. You either buy the ticket and take the ride, or you sit it out. Martha Park, author of *World Without End: Essays on Apocalypticism and After*, was one of these kinds of Christians too. She confesses that she “never actually read the Book of Revelation, in all my years growing up in the church.” When she finally did read it, at thirty years old, she finds not a fearful destruction of the world but something more like the Greek *apocalupsis*, meaning “unveiling” or “uncovering.” What she reads is more like “a flash of new understanding, often seeming to come from outside of ourselves. Rather than a new world, revelation leads to new sight, a new way of seeing the world that’s always been there.” The book of Revelation, she writes, brings > God’s kingdom to come… conveyed in earthly language: there is a river ‘bright as crystal,’ a fruit-bearing ‘tree of life.’ Even after the supposed end of the world, there is life abundant, ‘healing of the nations,’ a world un-degraded. ‘Nothing accursed will be found there anymore.’ > It seemed there was no real end of the world to be found here- only massive and continual change, not so unlike the world we live in now. I wonder if change might be harder to imagine- maybe even harder to bear- than a definitive end. Park’s essays revolve around two endings—the ending of her religious faith, and the ending (or near-term ending) of aspects of the Southern ecosystem that she holds dear. She mourns the loss of the Torreya pines in Florida and the presumed extinction of the ivory pileated woodpecker. In a particularly moving essay, she writes about the environmental cost of traditional burials and the religious people who are promoting natural burial in the Southeast. Along the way she reflects on the Methodist faith she has also lost. She only realizes she’s lost her faith when her father, a Methodist minister, retires. “Growing up”, she writes, “Wesleyan values like reason, discernment, and grace hovered far above other Christian concepts—like salvation, redemption, and sin—that I didn’t hear about so much. My father never preached much about any other life other than this life, or any world other than this one.” She found her eventual reading of the book of Revelation, as an adult, to be startling, the “physical world’s destruction: the sun turned black and the moon, red as blood; ‘the sky vanished like a scroll rolling itself up’; even the stars fell to earth.” The Methodist church gave Park a faith that rested, like a cloth, over the world as she knew it. There was no “mere” symbol to the biblical language she encountered. It was this world, the world she knew, as she experienced it. She writes lovingly of living in parsonages where “I could see the church sanctuary from every room in our small brick ranch-style house.” The churches were shabby but reverent, filled with “white-haired old ladies… lining up to shake my father’s hand in the doorway after church”; her father would ring a bell in the entry to quiet everyone down for worship. God was there, among them. “The world was drenched, then,” she writes, “with a presence around me called God. I walked with one hand aloft at my side for him to hold.” Park’s loss of faith, as is the case for many, corresponds with her passage into adulthood and with her father’s retirement from the ministry. After he retires, she no longer attends church, but in the year preceding it, she attends every Sunday, “crying in the second row.” Park’s father was a liberal mainline minister, of the type who is now mostly retired or extinct. She considers herself one of the “nones,” that demographic group that claims no religious affiliation. But she expresses a deep ambivalence toward her loss of faith. She has memories of the church that are deeply meaningful not because of what she believed or what it accomplished, but because of the crack of light that she saw throughout her time there. She finds her father one evening burning his old sermons in an outdoor fire and imagines it to be a form of ritual for a way of life, and a way of belief, that is now gone. Park’s descriptions of his ministry demonstrate her fondness for him. This love for her father and love for the church is all tangled up, inseparable. But once her father retires, she finds her faith is over, too. It would be too cheap a trick to say that Park is still a believer. But the stories in her essays are vivid and all alike in one way: They imagine a world that is gone yet dream of a means of return. When Park writes of the Torreya pines in Florida, she tells stories of conservationists who work hard for the survival of the species. The story starts with Elvin Edison Callaway, who read the book of Genesis and decided the garden of Eden must be northern Florida. The Torreya pine, which he thought must be the gopher tree that Noah used to build the ark, was already in decline by the 1980s. The roles of conservationists butt up at times against private landowners who seem comfortable to let nature’s decline take its course. It is an old and somewhat tired story of those who seek to save the world and those who are content to let nature take its course of inevitable decline. Fundamentalists abound. They show up in Callaway, but also in Park’s visit to Ken Ham’s “Ark Encounter,” in her stories of preppers who are preparing for “the end of the world,” and in the Bible church that builds an ugly, but well-intentioned natural cemetery. They show up in her chapter on the Scopes trial, for which she travels to Dayton, Tennessee and attends a reenactment. Her husband was formerly an evangelical, and she has other friends who spent time in these circles. But unlike many contemporary treatments of fundamentalists and evangelicals that are satisfied with caricature, Park writes about them with curiosity, mostly interested in their certainty. At times she seems jealous of it. Though she is opposed to their conclusions—what she sees as a lack of concern for their neighbors, for the climate, and for “science” broadly conceived—you can’t help but notice a kind of longing for the way these people live in the world. They live in the world as if it belonged to them, whereas Park’s experience is one of estrangement. The world she knows is one of loss. She sees it everywhere. My favorite essay told the story of the ivory billed woodpecker. The ivory billed woodpecker is presumed extinct. Much resides with that one word, “presumed.” Nicknamed the “Lord God Bird” (too good to be true!), the woodpecker was about twenty inches in length with a stunning thirty-inch wingspan. The bird is black with a red crested head and streaks of white down the length of its wings, as well as an ivory beak. The last known sighting of the bird was in 1944\. But in 2004, reported sightings of the bird drew interest from ornithologists, bird watchers, and journalists alike. News of the bird promised a potential economic windfall for the town of Brinkley, Arkansas, the location of the purported woodpecker sighting. Local businesses posted signage of the bird’s discovery, and the town geared for an influx of tourists, scientists, and birdwatchers. The missing bird was an emblem of forgotten hope, a harbinger of a species presumed dead, and now alive. You see where all of this is going. The woodpecker—the *Lord God Bird*—was back from the dead! Except it wasn’t. The documentary *Ghost Bird* (2009) presents a dramatic, slightly comic story of the event. The “true believers”—birdwatchers and scientists who are convinced that the bird is alive—and scientists and locals who think it was a misidentification, probably for the more common pileated woodpecker. The obsessive zeal of the birdwatchers comes across as almost religious. Some people just desperately wanted to believe in this bird. The documentary is really fun to watch. The birdwatchers are comic and even slightly heroic in their attempt to believe in this long-gone bird. It reminded me that believers are everywhere. Park writes movingly of the woodpecker. She seems certain, or nearly certain, that it is gone. But she wants so much to live in a world where this bird lives. He is a talisman for the hope she wishes she had. We so much want to believe impossible things. “I’ve often wondered how these old stories,” Park writes, “written in the midst of ‘their then’ still manage to speak to this world, to ‘our now.’ I’ve always sympathized with these anxious disciples, asking over and over again what the future will be like, and being told only to look around them; being told, over and over again, *this*.” Her conclusion is the conclusion of many a mainline Christian. She stakes her hope in this world, making the apocalyptic the inevitable change that the world always promises. She even stretches to give this acceptance of the world a philosophical bent: > Removing the promise of another world, the challenge of faith shifts: rather than waiting for some unseen world to take this one’s place, faith becomes about seeing this world as singular and sacred. Lately, it has felt painful to stay awake to a world so clearly suffering; difficult to experience wonder or holiness on these patches of earth I am no longer sure I recognize, almost impossible to be present to a changing world without knowing how this story will end. > But faith without an apocalypse- where there is no rapture, no promise of escape from this world to some other unseen, unscarred one- might be a way back to this world, not away from it. This kind of faith mirrors the uncertain world in which we live, the one that never really ends but keeps on changing. It is the cycles of *dharma* and the “vanity, vanity” of Ecclesiastes, the story of worlds beyond worlds. It is a good story, perhaps even a beautiful one. It contains within it the reality of the world’s suffering and the grief that we can feel when we observe it. Unlike some Christian stories, it admits that this world is a place of loss, a vale of tears. Christians believe several impossible things—or, at least, we are supposed to. We believe that God became human. We believe this God-man passed through life doing both ordinary and miraculous things. And then we believe that we killed him, a crowd both power-hungry and disappointed in the appearance of this King. After three days, unlikely things strike again, when this unlikely, crucified King rose from the dead. There have always been those who didn’t believe. For them, the tomb contains this King, still dead. But Christians historically were defined as those who *did* believe. The others, who didn’t believe, by definition, were not Christians. One uniqueness of the mainline is that it “resurrected” Christians who didn’t believe in the resurrection. What would have been a clear line-in-the-sand became an optional footnote. Perhaps he was, perhaps he wasn’t—it’s a good story either way. Park does not seem to believe in resurrection. But she believes most deeply in apocalypse: “Rather than a new world, revelation leads to new sight, a new way of seeing the world that’s always been there.” She is a mainline Christian, through and through, perhaps most clearly in the fact that she no longer believes in anything at all. But she wants to. She misses the church of her youth. She wants faith to mean something. She wants a faith that leads us to live deeper into the world: > But a faith without an apocalypse—where there is no rapture, no promise of escape from this world to some other unseen, unscarred one—might be a way back to this world, not away from it. This kind of faith mirrors the uncertain world in which we live, the one that never really ends but keeps on changing. In the Christian vision of the end-of-the-world, the dead will be raised. It is a privilege, really, to have known this world as something to love. But the hope that God founds, at the end of the world, does not just return to us what has been lost. It is this—and more. Park thinks that apocalypse can tuck us deeper into the world, like the dead who are buried in the natural cemeteries she describes. It is moving and beautiful. The burial practices themselves are deeply resonant with a Christian vision of caring for the bodies of the dead. But she cannot hold onto the belief that accompanied this vision for burying the dead. She wants the expansiveness, the opening to somewhere beyond, but has lost the taste for belief itself. I wish she knew she could have all this. Belief can be an adjustment to two truths—that so much has been lost, and yet all things will be made new. The apocalypse we can receive is the reality that there is a beyond. It is like one eye opening, a small speck of light. The world is in better hands than ours. The ivory billed woodpecker, the Torreya pines, the gravesites in the trees—they will all be renewed. Her father’s wrinkled hand will be made young again. In this apocalyptic vision, you can almost see him standing just out of sight. His hand is poised just above the sanctuary bell. Worship is about to begin. All she needs to do is walk in the door.