Word of the day: eschatology

The word of the day is eschatology:

< Greek ἔσχατο-ς last + -λογία discourse: see -logy comb. form; compare French eschatologie.

Theol.

a. The department of theological science concerned with ‘the four last things: death, judgement, heaven, and hell’.

 b. In recent theological writing, esp. as ‘realized eschatology’ (see quot. 1957), the sense of this word has been modified to connote the present ‘realization’ and significance of the ‘last things’ in the Christian life. (OED)

"There's agony in its scanning eye, its tiny
filtering teeth set in that gaping mouth, caught perversely
wide, a universal fellatio, opened to make it look more
than a shark enough; and even science will realize
that it's undead, its "ka" and "ba" fixed and lost
in equal measure, the flow of fluid not even providing
an optical illusion, no "weighing of the heart" beyond
the heartlessness of curiosity, eschatology of display."

 - John Kinsella, "Megamouth Shark", 7 March 2011 The New Yorker