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This Just In: Apocalypse now

Academia ponders the end of the world

By Dan Kennedy

A three-day-plus academic conference might not sound like your idea of a good time, but the folks at Boston University's Center for Millennial Studies are no ordinary scholarship wonks. Set up to study groups that promote doomsday scenarios involving the year 2000 ("the other Y2K problem," as the press materials put it), the center has a finely honed self-promotional flair that's unusual for academia.

Take, for instance, the agenda for its Third Annual International Millennial Conference (cosponsored with the Lilly Foundation), scheduled for December 6 through 8, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., at BU's George Sherman Union Conference Auditorium. The conference will kick off December 5 with a 7 p.m. showing of The Rapture, a 1992 apocalyptic film starring Mimi Rogers and David Duchovny. There will be an introduction and a question-and-answer session with director/screenwriter Michael Tolkin (who also, the center wants you to know, directed the "summer blockbuster" Deep Impact).

The serious business, which begins the next day, sounds at least as entertaining, featuring sessions with titles such as "Christians Who Kill and the Women Who Love Them" (watch for talks on "Apocalyptus Interruptus: Christian Fundamentalists, Sodomy, and the End" and "Fetal Legislation: The Partial Birth of a Nation?"), "Early Modern and 18th-Century Missionary Positions," and "The Meek Are Precisely the Problem!"

If you can't make it, you might want to check out the center's Web site, at http://www.mille.org. It includes a way-cool "Count Down to the Millennium" clock in days, hours, minutes, and seconds. Again showing a knack for what plays with the public, zero hour is set for January 1, 2000 -- a full year before the moment when the new millennium actually begins.

Admission to the full conference is $80, or $15 for students; per-day admission is $30, or $10 for students. Admission to The Rapture is $3.