Week 9, Cobb Chapter 9, Life Everlasting

I responded to Cobb's closing comments in this chapter:

"Most of these eschatological experiments in popular culture suggest a happier realm to come, but they also prompt us, each in its own way, to clarify what matters to us in the present, and to consider what ways of life might be better than others. This is a welcome use of popular culture."

I think that Cobb makes some good points in this chapter about how a focus on eschatology is important...especially when we see how this is reflected in popular culture. He does a good job of setting up how eschatology is more of a recent popular culture phenomena and I appreciated his comments on the origins of purgatory and how that plays out in secular film. I think that many of these apocalyptic films, Independence Day, What Dreams May Come, Terminator, capture the consequences of our human sin...apocalypse now! But the eschatology in some of these films isn't always fully realized or dealt with...I think that if they do one thing well, they get us thinking about the potential consequences of human sin and they create a dialogue about what happens next.