Life After Doom

Third is the meaning (or understanding) committee, often associated with the neocortex of the brain. It makes language possible and gives meaning to the word “meaning.” It enables me to talk to myself and observe myself. It integrates current awareness with memory of past experiences and with the ability to imagine future scenarios (as we did in th

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives—the power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change—truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts. —Novelist Salman Rushdie

Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann captures the relevance of grief in a time of doom: grief, he says, is the counter to denial.3

It feels so right that Zinn uses the word “defiance,” because that is what I feel: the energy of fierce defiance. All that is bad around us motivates me to resist, to defy, to refuse to comply, and that very defiance feels like a marvelous victory.

shock and denial, bargaining, anger, and depression. Ideally, depression eventually recedes and leaves us in a place of acceptance.

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music. —Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard

The Rapture was the Plymouth Brethren’s gift to Christendom way back in the 1830s.

Doom is a kind of pre-traumatic stress disorder that arises when our old normal is deteriorating and no new normal has come into view. For our purposes, it isn’t a single catastrophic event at some point in the future. Instead, it is the emotional and intellectual experience shared by all who realize the dangerous future into which we are presently

“Do you have hope?” What can I say? Here’s what I’ll say going forward: It depends on how you define hope. Hope is complicated. But writing this book is helping me to see that even if hope fails, something bigger can replace it, and that is love.