I am increasingly convinced that ours is an apocalyptic age. Like other apocalyptic ages, we find ourselves amidst a gradual but great unveiling of powers and principalities. ‘Things fall apart’, as W. B. Yeats had it, ‘the centre cannot hold’.
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Our apocalypse gives us an opportunity not to point fingers, but to roll up our sleves and seriously reflect on our individual and common life — in politics, culture, and faith. Often, quite frankly, it means to repent of our ways. For in the apocalypse, we ourselves are also unveiled.
I often return to Jeremiah 6:16, wherein we are urged to seek the ‘ancients paths, where the good way lies’. What are those ancient paths? And how can we walk them today? In The Second Coming, I attempt to understand our crossroad in modernity and trail the paths, not by retreating into the past, but by going forwards. I do so mainly by way of essays, some longer, some shorter.
Thus, The Second Coming is a space for exercising Catholic living and thinking. However, it welcomes not only Catholics, but anyone convicted by (or simply interested in) a spirit that is at once traditional, charismatic, and apocalyptic — one that resists both stale conservatism and mad progressivism. It is a space for all those who yearn for the true Apocalypse, the Second Coming of Christ the King.
Andreas E. Masvie is at Christ Church, University of Oxford, as a doctoral student in Theology and Religion, researching on the intersection of classics, patristics, politics— and philosophy and theology. Specifically, Andreas inquires into the nature of politics, drawing on the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre, and centring on the writings of Aristotle and St. Augustine. Andreas is also an author, commentator, critic, and recovering journalist (with planned relapses) covering all things political, cultural, and theological.
