Post-millennialists, by contrast, believe the rapture will take place after Jesus' thousand-year reign.
The plan is for the Rapture to take place tomorrow, accompanied by an earthquake or some such banal, increasingly frequent natural disaster.
Those known as post-tribulationist pre-millennialists believe the rapture will take place after an evil figure called the antichrist leads the world into Armageddon, or ultimate war, but before Jesus and the angels reign on earth.
And now, in the wake of Christian evangelist Harold Camping's infamous prediction that the Rapture would take place on 21 May 2011, a veritable plague of apocalyptic schlock is sweeping across America.
There are 11 installments so far, and they all take place after the Rapture, when all the true believers have been assumed into heaven, leaving everyone else to deal with the Antichrist and his minions, who sometimes take the shape of liberals and advocates of global government.
In some cases, the double membrane forms a boundary above which the processes of cell cutting such as rapturing vesiculation take place.
The moment when Cathy turned from the Communion rail, her hands clasped in front of her face in spiritual rapture, took Owen to a dazed and elevated place.
The company's follow-up Everybody's Gone to the Rapture takes the theme further: you follow the story of six disappeared people as you roam an abandoned village in Shropshire during the apocalypse.
Nobody in the Left Behind books worries too much about the people who've been taken in the Rapture — everyone simply assumes that they're in the proverbial "better place," and have been given a well-deserved reward for their true Christian faith.
And Carol Ann Duffy's brilliant 2006 collection Rapture takes its title from one of Robert Browning's poems: "That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, / Lest you should think he never could recapture / That first fine careless rapture!' Just months before he died in December 1889, a representative of the new Edison company made a recording of Browning's voice on a wax cylinder.
