This third and final volume of the Millennialism and Society series brings us not to the end but to a new beginning. While the study of millennialism has traditionally taken place within the confines of departments of religion, anthropology, sociology, or history, the editors of this series hope to widen the parameters of discussion beyond departmental entrenchments and beyond the academy itself. The theoretical structures and sociocultural responses of millennialism exceed the confines of any strict definition even as they expand across time and space as a means toward ordering the cosmos and reassuring believers in the essential trustworthiness of an unfolding history.

Millennialism has conventionally been understood as a sense-making position: people focus on the approaching end of time as a means to make sense of their immediate situation. Time itself may be linear or cyclical or helical, but the nearness of its end, however plotted, convinces believers that meaning must be created in relation to endings, a situation that infuses the present with a sense of urgency. Millennialism is unstuck in time, and despite its semantic similarities to millennial years such as 1000 or 2000, its uses exceed calendrical events. Unmoored from specific dates, millennialism appears in history whenever an approaching end is the governing idea behind a social, intellectual, or artistic movement.

Millennialism is most narrowly defined by its strictest sense in Christian religious texts and imagery as the imminent return of Jesus and his reign on earth for a period of 1000 years.