ABSTRACT
The essays themselves find their origin in a much-followed public lecture series held at the University of St Andrews to mark the bimillennial year. As the first of our essayists, Jürgen Moltmann, points out, the year 2000 signified very little in its own right, except the poetic stardust of those three noughts. The misadventures of London’s Millennium Dome at Greenwich – now fast retreating from memory – no doubt demonstrated the poverty of that slight magic. With the possible exception of its star attraction, the ‘Body Zone’ (which happened to feature an authentic natural wonder), the Dome failed to address anything vital in collective memory or in spiritual imagination. It offered no point of deeper human self-recognition. It found little to celebrate or commemorate beyond a kaleidoscope of acceptable contemporary images. What it in fact – and briefly – memorialized was the ethos of a passing political moment, and its own monument-making.
