Sound Discoveries: The End of the World as We Know It?

Sound Discoveries Presents:

The End of the World as We Know It? 

A Medievalist's Perspective on the Apocalypse 

Friday, October 9, 2026 | 3:00PM

Joslyn Hall

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Carteret Community College Foundation's Sound Discoveries series is excited to present a unique lecture and discussion, The End of the World as We Know It?: A Medievalist's Perspective on the Apocalypse, featuring UNC Chapel Hill's Brett Whalen, PhD. 

For almost two millennia and counting, Christians have awaited the end-times promised by Jesus Christ in the gospels and prophesied in the Book of Revelation. Prophets, preachers, and theologians in the past have viewed various historical events—the fall of the Roman Empire, the rise of Islam, the crusades, the Mongol invasion of Europe, the “discovery” of the New World, and more—as signs that the apocalypse was indeed at hand. So far, they’ve all been wrong. In this talk, Brett Whalen, a professor of medieval religious history at UNC-Chapel Hill, will discuss some of the ways that Christians have made sense out of the world around them by speculating about the end of days—and how some of them might so again as the apocalyptic year 2033 draws near.

BIO: Dr. Brett Whalen is a professor of history at UNC-CH and is currently the the lead editor of Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture. Among other works, Whalen is the author of Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (2009) and The Two Powers: Church, Empire, and the Struggle for Sovereignty in the Thirteenth Century (2019). He is writing a new book, Jesus: A Two-Thousand Year History, which explores the cultural significance of Jesus Christ as a religious figure across two millennia around the globe.

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