WorldShift 2012

October 1, 2009
Perhaps the fretting over the coming cosmic dustup has faded, but the world will end in December 2012or so say certain interpretations of ancient Mesoamerican calendars and dubious readings of Christian and Chinese traditions. Three recent publications take up the 2012 question without fear. Theologian Hitchcock ("The Late Great United States: What Bible Prophecy Reveals About America's Last Days") dismisses the prophecies of doom as unreliable and un-Christian, although he embraces the notion of Apocalypse on God's timetable, not available to the mortal eye. Think-tank founder and prolific author Laszlo ("Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: How the New Scientific Reality Can Change Us and Our World") simply uses the notion of the 2012 breakdown/breakthrough as a vehicle for the transformation of the world. Danelek ("UFOs: The Great Debate; Mystery of Reincarnation") adopts his usual moderately skeptical stance and his characteristic intelligence to show that prophecies are worse than unreliable and that there is as much reason to greet the future with guarded optimism as millennial panic. VERDICT None of these books will feed the frenzy of the fearful. Hitchcock's title will attract a conservative Christian audience, while Laszlo and Danelek will appeal, respectively, to earth-conscious readers and readers in (and debunkers of) the paranormal.

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