In this series of meditations, Norman Wirzba, Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology and senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, recasts hope not as something people have, like a vaccine to prevent pain and trouble, but as something people do. Hope evaporates in conditions of abandonment and abuse. It grows in contexts of nurture and belonging. Hope ignites when people join in what Wendell Berry calls “love’s braided dance”—a commitment to care for one another and our world.
 
Through personal narratives and historical examples, Wirzba explores what sustains hope and why it so often seems absent from our vision of the future. The vitality of hope, he maintains, depends on a collective commitment to care for the physical world (its soils and waters, plants and animals, homes and neighborhoods) and to promote the moral, aesthetic, and spiritual ideals that affirm life as good, beautiful, and sacred.
 
Engaging with such contemporary topics as climate change, AI and social media, and the intensifying refugee crises and drawing on the wisdom of James Baldwin, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Martha Graham, and others, Wirzba offers a powerful argument for hope as a way of life in which people are intimately and practically joined with all the living.

Professor Wirzba pursues research and teaching interests at the intersections of theology, philosophy, ecology, and agrarian and environmental studies. He is the author of numerous book including Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land, Way of Love: Recovering the Heart of Christianity, From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World, and (with Fred Bahnson) Making Peace with the Land: God’s Call to Reconcile with Creation.

Read more about Love's Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis.