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HUMANITY has always had half an eye on the end of the world. In fact, as Mark O’Connell writes in his entertaining new book, some sort of apocalyptic expectation seems to be a precondition of being human.
Saint Augustine, for instance, wrote in the 5th century that early followers of Jesus fervently believed themselves to be living in the end of days. Augustine thought they were jumping the gun by a few centuries though, lamenting that: “If there were ‘last days’…
