Promises never cease for a “new world, a new heaven, and a new earth.”

As a person reads more and more non-fiction works, common threads begin to develop.  The most prevalent of these threads is that regardless of generation or time in human history, the same basic arguments and philosophies battle for supremacy.  Socialism, capitalism, fundamentalism, nationalism, etc.  The debate never ends and while the players, personalities, and facts on the ground continue to change and evolve, the basic philosophies are the same.  Consider the following excerpt from the book I am reading, Fordlandia:

It was, after all, an age of competitive redemptions.  Socialist: the radical journalist John Reed in his Ten Days That Shook the World described the 1917 Russian Revolution as building an earthly “kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer.”  Russians, he said, would no longer need priests to “pray them into heaven.”  Nationalist: T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, in an account of his role in helping to spark the 1922 Arab revolt against the Ottoman empire, wrote that the rebellion was fought in the name of a “new heaven and a new earth.”  Fundamentalist: the Reverend Billy Sunday held 40,000-strong revival meetings in the heart of Detroit in the years after the inauguration of the Five Dollar Day, vying with Ford for the press’s attention.  And capitalist: Ford too promised to deliver not just a cheap car to the “multitude” but a “new world, a new heaven, and a new earth.”

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