Hope's work
Beating paths through troubled times
Category: Latest
The weight of the white body
Reading time: 7 min. The weight of a white cop’s body, all of it, bearing down on a black person’s neck, held there for eight minutes, all year, for decades, centuries, since the first black slave was sold into American…
Read MoreHope and the coronavirus outbreak (2/2): On going back to ‘normal’
Reading time: 11 min. Sean cleans the streets here. The high street is deserted – no people, no Big Mac boxes or Coke cans – so he spends his mornings going up the canal and down the river and round…
Read MoreHope and the coronavirus outbreak (1/2): A few first thoughts
I don’t really know what to make of what’s happening yet. ‘Normal’, such as it was, seems to have ended. It might come back, but for a long while at least most of us will probably be living in a…
Read MoreHope (8/8): Bringing it home
Reading time: 12 minutes. ‘This leads us, probably, to as good a definition of the beloved community as we can hope for: common experience and common effort on a common ground to which one willingly belongs.’ Wendell Berry, in ‘Writer…
Read MoreHope (7/8): Who’s with us?
Reading time: 9 min. In last week’s blog we found that people of hope, unlike those who are simply optimistic, don’t depend on a future in which all the brokenness of the world gets fixed. For as long as the…
Read MoreHope (6/8): To be or not to be
Reading time: 8 min. In last week’s blog we were looking at how hopeful people find, in a world that seems locked down by the powerful, that it’s actually a place of continuous change, where ‘the power of the powerless’…
Read MoreHope (5/8): Ripening the times
Reading time: 8 min. If you’ve been reading these blogs from the beginning (thank you) then you’ll know I’ve been introducing people who are well-grounded in their hope. So far we’ve looked at three qualities they share in common. All…
Read MoreHope (4/8): Facing tragedy
Reading time: 8 min. In these blogs we’re exploring six qualities of consciously hopeful people and communities. We’ve looked at the first two so far: involvement in the life of the world, rather than distance from it; and a feeling…
Read MoreHope (3/8): A place of promise
Reading time: 8 min. ‘Hope is something you make every day’. This is Basma, and the first thing she tells me about hope. When a militia came to burn down her home in Libya, she and her daughters ran for…
Read MoreHope (2/8): Into the life of the world (b)
Reading time: 8 min. This blog series is about people of hope: how are some people and communities able to live and act in hope, conscious though they are of a future that may be becoming harder to face?
Read MoreHope (1/8): Into the life of the world (a)
Reading time: 8 min. I’ve been sitting down with people who work with hope in some way: activists, refugees, a nurse, chaplains, psychotherapists, people without homes, and community workers. What are they striving for, what motivates them, what in their…
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