The long run

Another perspective on the end that may or may not be nigh was provided by Jürgen Moltmann, an octogenarian theologian from Tübingen, Germany, who sat in a wing chair in the rector’s parlor, glass of wine in hand, and dismissed current anxieties about environmental apocalypse—widely held among secularists who dismiss the Rapture as nothing more than a song by Blondie—as misplaced. 'One should not speak about the end of the world if what one means is the end of our culture,' Professor Moltmann said, pointing out that the dinosaurs may have been extinguished but life on earth went on. 'If you are mankind-centered, it’s a catastrophe; but if you are life-centered it is that while one life ends, another begins.'

-- from Apocalypse Not by Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker