Booked for 2000?

NEW YORK--If you're ready to turn the page on the 20th century, just visit your local Barnes & Noble or surf Amazon.com. Bookshelves are brimming with millennial titles by both secular and religious publishers. Publishers Weekly magazine recently surveyed the millennial literary fare, highlighting survival guides, computer and technology primers, humor, fiction, compilations of the "best of," and even journals for recording your own millennial memoirs.

On the religion side, evangelicals have beat Catholics hands-down in millennial publishing--not surprising because Catholic theology tends to downplay apocalypticism. Evangelical authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins have topped the bestseller charts with their six novels in the blockbuster Left Behind fiction series.

Renowned church historian Martin E. Marty picked his favorite titles from the PW list, including Apocalypses: Prophecies, Cults, and Millennial Beliefs Through the Ages (Harvard, 1999) by Eugen Weber; The Millennium Myth: Hope for a Postmodern World (Westminster/ John Knox, 1999), by N. T. Wright; and The New Millennium Manual (Baker, 1999) by Robert Clouse, Robert Hosack, and Richard Pierard.