If there is a large wild card in the new millennium, it is genetic engineering. It's conceivable, if barely so, that manipulation of genes could change the innate capacity for good and evil that has marked mankind through all the ages. In St. Paul's conception, man was created in the image of God but marred by original sin. Freud talked of the id, ego and superego. Perhaps genetic engineers could manipulate the prefrontal cortex, but the essential duality would remain.
Freedom implies a capacity for evil, but a higher nature calls man to repentance and goodness.
The Century opened with the Belle Epoque , a note of historical optimism. It dissolved into two world wars, the great depression, major nations of the world run by psychopaths, several large attempts to reduce men to cogs in some scheme ostensibly utopian but of course profoundly anti-utopian. We can hope that the era closed with the collapse of the communist empire in 1989, that after a false start rising incomes and an information age are leading us toward a new era of individual empowerment. It is scarcely surprising, though, that the turn of the millennium finds new, if uneven, currents of interest in the ancient questions of faith and spirit. All the more so since the bloody century just closing has been an increasingly secular one, when science was to replace religion, when philosophers declared God dead, when inherited wisdoms were replaced by skepticism and relativism.