The time is now. In Paris, an American surgeon named Paul Osborn sees the man who murdered his father and tries to kill him.

More than twenty World Bank practitioners deliver their vision of the policy agenda for, and likely economic evolution of, developing countries in the post-crisis era.

Humanity is moving ever towards its final destination without knowing why, when, where: teloi, multiple paths, leading towards God’s eschaton. These essays examine the movement towards this day of reckoning, and how such eschatological events are projected back into time. Towards the Day after Tomorrow, or the one after that, or months, decades—centuries—away, often we behave as though the end is upon us. These essays start with the beginning of the end: the incarnation. We examine the origins of Karl Barth’s realized eschatology in Expressionism. We consider death and judgment, as usurped by humanity, an eschaton without God’s forgiving judgment: multiple Holocausts. War ushers in the eschaton, but how do Christians handle conflict in the light of a redefined just war theory? We analyze the eschatological insights into humanity’s end in The Simpsons—post mortem. Consider the issue of atheistic human authorities usurping God’s judgment. Finally crisis and judgment are glimpsed in the mindset of people who suffer seizures—postlapsarian exile, the sufferance of salvation: how God blesses us despite the chaos of our human-generated teloi, in preparation for the end. As the end approaches, events become darker, chaotic, confusion reigns: “Judas immediately went out. And it was night.”

Seeking for philosophy the same spirit and assurance conveyed by artists like Fred Astaire, Cavell presents essays exploring the meaning of grace and gesture in film and on stage, in language and in life. Critical to the renaissance in American thought Cavell hopes to provoke is the recognition of the centrality of the “ordinary” to American life.

The planet is warming up and as the ice caps melt, the great currents of the oceans shift and the Northern Hemisphere is plunged into a new ice age. One scientist has the key to turning back the clock of global warming. But as Western civilisation succumbs to blizzards and tidal waves and the population of the Northern hemisphere begins a mass exodus south, mankind's only saviour is making a lonely, terror-filled trip north. To a New York disappearing under snowdrifts hundreds of feet high. The city where his son was last heard of.