Where can we find hope when the world seems so hopeless? Ours is not the first generation to pose this question. Across different eras and cultural contexts, people have sought ways out of despair. This volume assembles voices of hope drawn from multiple generations, faith traditions, scholarly disciplines, and regions of the world. These voices range from Thomas Aquinas and Pope Leo XIV to Jane Goodall and Imtiaz Sooliman, and from Desmond Tutu and Jonathan Sacks to Amanda Gorman and Yahya Mahmmoud. Together, they remind us that hope is not the same as optimism. It is neither an emotion nor a feeling. Hope is a personal and public practice, a way of living in tension, oriented toward what is not yet. It is something we practice because it is good in itself. This book is an invitation to join this conversation and explore whether and how it is still possible to be surprised by hope in our own time and our own contexts.
Introduction
Thomas Aquinas: Hope means participation in Gods love
Frederick Douglass: Hope in finding ones voice and the freedom of becoming
Reinhold Niebuhr: Saved by hope
Viktor Frankl: Hoping as a response to the circumstances of life
Paul Ricoeur: Hopeful language?
Etty Hillesum: Hope as inner resistance
Nelson Mandela: Hope that changed the course of a nation
Jürgen Moltmann: Suffering hope?
Johann Bapt ist Metz: Hope from remembrance of suffering
Martin Luther King Jr.: The infinite complexity of hope
Desmond Tutu: Hope, suffering, and witness
Frits Goldschmeding: Hope as a basis for finding a new economic direction
Jane Goodall: Hope rooted in nature and relationship
Pope Francis: Hope does not disappoint
Václav Havel: The certainty that something makes sense
Audre Geraldine Lorde: Hope is where the sun meets the earth
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew: The hope of transforming the world
John D. Caputo: Hoping against hope
Charles Snyder: Hope as a positive motivational state
Allan Boesak: Hope and the language of life in faith and politics
Martha Nussbaum: Hope against fear and passivity
Jonathan Sacks: A life in service of hope
Russel Botman: Hope as embodied public practice
Pope Leo XIV: United in the oneness of Christ
Thabo Makgoba: Hope as a liberation process
Imtiaz Sooliman: Hope in the face of disaster
Christian Wiman: Hope as loyalty to ones deepest yearnings
Geordin Hill-Lewis: Cape Town a city of hope for all
Malala Yousafzai: Hope in education for all
Amanda Gorman: Believing beyond disaster
Yahya Mahmmoud: Hope is in creating hopeful memories
Autumn Peltier: Hope carried through water
Can we be surprised by hope once more?
List of contributors and editors
Dr. Jan Jorrit Hasselaar, theologian and economist, is Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Religion and Sustainable Development, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is research fellow of the University of the Western Cape (South Africa). Hasselaar chaired the working group Sustainable Development of the Council of Churches in the Netherlands (2011-2018).
