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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Introduction: Choosing Disneyland instead of Promised Land?
I begin by putting the question to you: is it not true that Disneyland has become not only our Euro-N. American playground but a metaphor for contemporary culture? That is, without any sense of criticising culture's need for leisure and—maybe theologians need more play and less books—nor to ignore the efforts made by Euro Disneyland to become environmentally politically respectable—but to see such glittering theme parks as one symptom of a cult of the superficial, a selling short of humanity in terms of our dreams and our hopes for the future. Harvey Cox began to hint at this so many years ago, in his book Seduction of the Spirit, when he warned us that Disneyland has no tomorrow, no future to offer: it offers only brighter, more technologically sophisticated and more luxurious versions of today. And now, when confronted with the most extravagant theme park of all, the Millennium Dome, the existence and contents of which are, to put it mildly, contentious, is it not timely to reflect on the meaning of this cultural artefact in terms of its highly ambiguous promise in the context of the end of a century and the end of a millennium?
My argument in this lecture is that the characteristics of this waning millennium offer parallels with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and the onset of the Dark Ages. (You probably remember Alasdair MacIntyre's call for a new St Benedict in this, the new Dark Ages of Europe).
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2 Maclntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue, (London: Duckworth, 1981), pp. 144‐5Google Scholar.
3 E. Gibbon, “Essai sur l'étude de la littérature”, in Miscellaneous Works, Vol iv, p. 15.
4 Letter to Edward Gibbon, Rome, 9th October? 1764, in Letters, Vol I, p. 184.
5 Robertson, John, “Gibbon's Roman Empire as a universal monarchy: the Decline and Fall of the imperial idea in early modern Europe”, in Edward Gibbon and Empire, eds., McKitterick, and Quinault, , (Cambridge: CUP 1997), p.245Google Scholar.
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7 Keller, Catherine, Apocalypse Now–and then: a Feminist Guide to the End of the World, (Boston: Beacon, 1996), pp 102‐3Google Scholar
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12 Keller, ibid. p. 108
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25 “A Woman's Creed” cited in Beijing Preparatory documents, and quoted in Catherine Keller, op cit., 268. Actually it was composed by Robin Morgan with a group of Third World women sponsored by a women's Environment and Development organisation.
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