With its strange and vivid visions and often grotesque imagery, the Book of Revelation has long perplexed those who would attempt to read its pages.  Dreadful and hopeful, dreamy and disgusting, Revelation is a “sticky bit of Biblical tradition” according to the scholar Timothy Beale, “hard to grasp firmly and even harder to let go.”    No Biblical book has been as simultaneously revered and reviled, as misused and abused, as the Revelation of Jesus Christ to Saint John.  Some view the book as the very pinnacle, the apotheosis of prophetic vision and imagination, misconstruing John’s visions as mysteriously predictive of a future already written rather than descriptive of a present or past still open to possibilities.  Others deride the book, unfairly though perhaps understandably, as the veritable ravings of a madman, as a nightmare born of a fevered mind, as a “pornography of violence” to use a phrase coined by the Biblical scholar, John Dominic Crossan.   The Book of Revelation, however, is not quite the “rough beast” we would make it out to be.  In this course, we will explore “Revelation” not as some bizarre apparition of the “end of days” but as a concrete message of hope for those living at the edges or margins of the world rather than the end of the world.  We will reflect upon what Revelation can teach us about living faithfully and responsibly in today’s world.