Politics, Religion, Hope : Contemporary Theoretical Perspectives

In this period of pandemics, the environmental crisis, and fraying of political consensus, the question of hope is especially pressing. Is hope reasonable or is it necessary, and for what and for whom? Is it only the property now of right-wing populists, using the rolling economic, immigration, and pandemic crises, and the new affordances of social media, in the cause of reactionary revolt against the social and cultural gains of the last centuries, such as the inclusion of women and other minorities, as well as awareness of ecological depredation? Do we find ourselves in a Yeatsian time, wherein proverbially, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity” (Yeats 2016, 33), or does the stretching and failing of contemporary paradigms announce new, more affirmative possibilities?
What resources for hope can we find in the great religious and political traditions, whether Islamic, Jewish, Christian, or other? Does the instrumental and ideological use of these traditions disqualify them as sources of renewal and reorientation? Likewise, are there existing resources within the political paradigms of liberalism, democracy, republicanism, or socialism which can be looked to resolve the present symptoms of despair, alienation, and incivility, or must entirely new political models be imagined or looked to? Are more two-sided theoretical assessments of these traditions, as sources of both corruption and catharsis, dominion and liberation, needed if we are to build new coalitions capable of addressing the crises, or is hope necessarily open or blind, committed to holding open the possibility that something absolutely Other must occur?

© The Author(s) 2022