Hope's work
Facing the future in an age of crises
Category: Latest
Hope and a politics of care (1): The morning after partygate
Hello friends. Thanks for visiting. Here’s the first of a pair of posts on hope and a politics of care. It’s a 10-minute read / 15-minute listen. A few hours after I posted this, Boris Johnson’s prime ministership was falling…
Read MoreSeason’s turn
Hello all Thank you for subscribing to the Hope’s Work blog this year. I hope you’ve found there some productive prompts for pondering what real hope means for you in these disturbed times. Talk of hope does feel in the…
Read MoreHope and the ecological crisis (4): Water music
After a bit of a gap, the last in a series of four posts on hope in the face of the ecological crisis… it’s a 14-minute read or a 20-minute listen.
Read MoreHope and the ecological crisis (3): Doing enough
Reading time: 10 min. Mary’s a voice coach, so I’m not expecting her to have me squat down, curl into a ball, and say ahh.
Read More‘Hope’s Work’ book – just published
Hi friends Some of you asked to be told when my book about hope would be coming out. The answer is: today! Hope’s work: Facing the future in an age of crises is out now, beautifully designed by publishers Darton,…
Read MoreHope and the ecological crisis (2): Piece work
Reading time: 9 min. I ask the internet to show me ‘English countryside’ and up pops the usual: long vistas over fields of green and gold; trees coddled in dawn mist; gentle hills at sunset. Here is England as the…
Read MoreHope and the ecological crisis (1): Keeping home
Reading time: 11 min. Hello again, and welcome to the first post in what might become a short series on the theme.
Read MoreThe 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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