Cultivating Hope

Image: Mariame Kaba, “Hope is a discipline.”

Cornel West: “Optimism for me has never been an option. Because there’s too much suffering in the world.” Hope, on the other hand, is “an act of courage and imagination.”

Rebecca Solnit: “Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act . . . Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting.”

George Hrbek: “I always go back to the absolute necessity of community. When you’re part of a hope movement, if you’re talking about how do I keep up my spirits, and how does hope stay alive in my own life, it doesn’t come by me operating singularly. It’s within community, together with other people who also hope, and who provide encouragement to each other.”

Lynn Burnett: “If we pause to think about the Black Freedom Struggle saying, ‘making a way out of no way’, we can see that it expresses a teaching about hope: a teaching that possibility — ‘making a way’ — exists even within seemingly impossible situations: ‘out of no way.’ The phrase clearly acknowledges harsh realities, while expressing a commitment to keeping the spirit and the struggle alive. Hope is a path, carved between naïve optimism and pessimistic defeatism.”

Books

Allan Aubrey Boesak: Dare We Speak of Hope? Searching for a Language of Life in Faith and Politics.

Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone: Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in with Unexpected Resilience and Creative Power.

Rebecca Solnit: Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities.

Krista Tippett: Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living.

Articles

Lynn Burnett: In Memoriam for George Hrbek: A Life of Radical Hope.

Mariame Kaba: Hope Is a Discipline: Mariame Kaba on Dismantling the Carceral State.

Sigal Samuel: Why Cornel West is hopeful (but not optimistic): A conversation about Black liberation theology, existentialism, and other philosophies that can help us through these times.

Rebecca Solnit: ‘Hope is an embrace of the unknown’: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times.

Jessica Stillman: Want to Be More Successful? Psychology Says You Should Stop Trying to Be Optimistic and Be Hopeful Instead: No, hope and optimism are not the same thing. And research is clear that for positive life outcomes, hope is most important.

Kendra Thomas: Hope is not the same as optimism, a psychologist explains − just look at MLK’s example.