For the last day of the philosophy of time class I taught for JCI Scholars this summer, I had us read The Church and the Kingdom, a “sermon” of sorts in which the philosopher Giorgio Agamben relays in accessible form the interpretation of messianic time he treats at greater length in The Time That Remains. I decided to close with this piece about how the early Christian church thought about the Second Coming (Parousia) in part because they have interesting perspectives on the material I like to think about, and because I thought it might speak to their own experience of awaiting release from prison. The central problem of Agamben’s text is to retrieve the original meaning of “the time of the messiah,” wresting…

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