The Year 2000

by Strozier, Charles B.; Flynn, Michael

• ISBN13: 9780814780305
• ISBN10: 081478030X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-07-01
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

The Year 2000 is at hand. The end of the millennium means many things to many people, but it has significance for almost everyone. A thousand years ago, monks stopped copying manuscripts and religious building projects came to a halt as panic swept Europe. Today, anxiety about global warming, government power, superviruses, even recycling, is on some level rooted in the fear of irreversible cataclysm. In a landscape shadowed by racial conflict, technological upheaval, AIDS, and nuclear weapons, we reasonably fear the end of history. 2000 looms large in our religious, political, and cultural imagination. But while 2000 brings dread it also raises the prospect of transformation. There is hope to be found in the apocalyptic.This panoramic volume explores how the Year 2000 operates in contemporary political discourse, from Black evangelical politics to radical right-wing rhetoric. One section is devoted specifically to apocalyptic violence, analyzing twentieth-century cults and cultural movements, from David Koresh--who renamed his Waco compound Ranch Apocalypse and perished in a modern-day Armageddon that fueled the millennialist angst of other extremist groups--to environmental campaigns like Earth First! that also rely on the language of violence and imminent doom in their greening of the Apocalypse.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction	1	(12)
Charles B. Strozier
PART I: Religion	13	(84)
2 The Apocalyptic Year 1000: Millennial Fever and the Origins of the Modern West	13	(17)
Richard A. Landes
3 Medieval Millenarianism: Its Bearing on the Comparative Study of Millenarian Movements	30	(12)
Norman Cohn
4 The Breast, the Apocalypse, and the Colonial Journey	42	(17)
Catherine Keller
5 God, Lincoln, and the Civil War	59	(14)
Charles B. Strozier
6 Apocalyptic Spirituality: Approaching the Third Millennium	73	(8)
Bernard McGinn
7 The Other Is Ourselves: A Feminist Spirituality for the Year 2000 and Beyond	81	(16)
Marie L. Baird
PART II: Apocalyptic Violence	97	(72)
8 Apocalyptic Violence and the Politics of Waco	97	(15)
Charles B. Strozier
9 Reflections on Aum Shinrikyo	112	(9)
Robert Jay Lifton
10 Shifting Millennial Visions in New Religious Movements: The Case of the Holy Order of MANS	121	(12)
Phillip Charles Lucas
11 On the Image of 2000 in Contemporary Cults	133	(11)
Margaret Thaler Singer
12 Phallic Millennialism and Radical Environmentalism: The Apocalyptic Vision of Earth First!	144	(10)
Lois Ann Lorentzen
13 Coercive Purity: The Dangerous Promise of Apocalyptic Masculinity	154	(15)
Lee Quinby
PART III: Politics	169	(70)
14 The Paucity of the Millennial Moment: The Case of Nuclearism	169	(11)
Richard Falk
15 Is the Apocalypse Coming? Paramilitary Culture after the Cold War	180	(10)
J. William Gibson
16 Racist Apocalypse: Millennialism on the Far Right	190	(16)
Michael Barkun
17 Political Millennialism within the Evangelical Subculture	206	(11)
Sara Diamond
18 The Millennial Concept and the Evolution of Leadership in Black Pentecostalism and the Nation of Islam	217	(13)
Clarence Taylor
19 The Flight from Finitude	230	(9)
Jean Bethke Elshtain
PART IV: Culture	239	(86)
20 Searching for Alternatives: Autobiography and Masculinity at the Bimillennium	239	(11)
Michael Flynn
21 Hysteresis of the Millennium	250	(13)
Jean Baudrillard
22 The Impending Computer Crisis of the Year 2000	263	(10)
Sandra Schanzer
23 Millennium, Texas	273	(11)
Michael Erard
24 After Armageddon: Apocalyptic Art since the Seventies: Tactics of Survival in a Postnuclear Planet	284	(15)
Peter von Ziegesar
25 Theater at 2000: A Witnessing Project	299	(10)
Karen Malpede
26 Economics of the Millennium	309	(16)
Hillel Schwartz
Contributors	325	(4)
Index	329	(14)
About the Editors	343