What Can We Reasonably Hope For?

It is of course the case that only God knows what will happen in the next century and the next millennium. But we human beings are created with an irrepressible disposition toward the future, as well as a capacity to recall the past. In the last year we published a "millennium series" of articles remembering, century by century, where we have been. Now we ask a group of notable thinkers, all of whom are familiar to our readers, what they expect of the future. Writers were free to choose their own topics, and we trust our readers will agree that the result is a suggestive, and frequently provocative, contribution to the right ordering of expectations, hopes, and fears for the century and millennium now upon us.