apostasy, punishment, repentance, and renewal.

In the current saeculum, the First Turning was the American High of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies. As World War II wound down, no one predicted that America would soon become so confident and institutionally muscular, yet so conformist and spiritually complacent. But that's what happened. The Second Turning was the Consciousness

The Fourth Turning is history's great discontinuity. It ends one epoch and begins another.

As Arthur Wing Pinero has written, “The future is only the past again, entered through another gate.”

When we deem our social destiny entirely self-directed and our personal lives self-made, we lose any sense of participating in a collective myth larger than ourselves.

As Boomers have begun turning fifty, the public discourse has become less refined and conciliatory and more impassioned and moralistic. Why? The midlife Prophet is replacing the midlife Artist.

nothing is older than our habit of calling everything new.

cyclical time as a living faith has been pushed ever deeper into obscurity.

Time begins with a fall from grace; struggles forward in an intermediate sequence of trials, failures, revelations, and divine interventions; and ends with redemption and reentry into the Kingdom of God.