Certain questions naturally arise about those who literally expect the end of the world in our time: Why do they think this? Why do some people believe them? How do their exhortations work to persuade an audience and to mobilize that audience to actions and commitments? These are the motivating questions of this unique volume, which describes apocalyptic as a rhetorical genre of discourse. Brummett first recasts insights drawn from past scholarly and theological studies to feature their relevance to contemporary apocalyptic, then examines a variety of "real" apocalyptic to illustrate the ways in which these rhetorical discourses actually work.