The Year 2000: Promise of a Common Hope?

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As the year 2000 approaches, the media will be offering us every imaginable interpretation of the millennium. Like seeds whose future blossoms will fall on all of us at the midnight hour of January 1, 2000, these emerging notions of the exciting all-in-one-turn of the year, the decade, the century and the millennium may soon be fixed in our minds. Perhaps before their inevitable influence becomes too big to control, we might ask as to their meanings. Indeed, a critical awareness of their roots now may even help to shape celebrations they bring tomorrow..

The millennium--as reckoned on the Gregorian calendar--is essentially a Christian concept. After all, it is the two-thousandth anniversary of the birth of Jesus which is celebrated: the coming into the world of a Jewish teacher whose life and teaching has transformed the West in general. But five years from now, Jews will celebrate merely the year 5760, while other religious will continue to observe time according to their own schemes. How is it possible, then, in a culturally and religiously pluralistic society such as that of the United States, to expect anything like unanimity of soul on such an occasion? Chinese and Muslim observants …