A sociologist appeals to theological hope in postmodern apocalypses.

When one reads the newspapers, apocalyptic narratives are overwhelming. From overpopulation and global warming, humans are threatened with natural collapse. In the Middle East, reactionaries, supported by the tenets of an apocalyptic Christian Zionism, dollars support the ushering in of a religious end time. Hugh Gusterson's research even observed how some Christian fundamentalists find their way into conscious hopes for the end time while working on nuclear technologies in the deserts of the southwest corner of the United States. Politically, we have moved from Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" to Samuel Huntington's doomed "clash of civilizations." In the average American's "tube scan," one can find references to Nostradamus' predictions or the Aztec cosmology's end time in year 2012 in a weeknight's television programming. The gap between "liberal" and "conservative" seems to widen, as predicted in James Davison Hunter's book Culture Wars as the Tea Party threatens an apocalyptic, revolutionary terminus to the status quo. American and world politics present themselves with a fascination with apocalyptic narratives.

It seems that the secular optimism of the 1990s has eclipsed into a post-secular grasp of the certainty of reactionary political and religious belief. In this context, it is so easy to forget the voice of tradition. In postmodernity, the claims of science and tradition have been debunked, lost to a groundless state of being-in-the-world where nothing can be counted on. In this context, reactionary religious belief gives a ground to many in the face of political and natural fallout. After the political-religious disaster of September 11th, researchers at the University of Chicago found that America's reaction was to cling more strongly to religious communities and beliefs. (1) But what kinds of beliefs and supports are the contemporary sphere offering? Certainty is offered.

As a sociologist, I have recognized the limitation of modern and secular solutions to the various anxieties produced as a result of modernity. Religious demographics show a large shift to more conservative faiths among young people, largely in the turn to Orthodoxy and fundamentalism. (2) As Jay Tolson has explored, young people are looking for "structure" in response to the perceived broken promises of modernity. This is prominent not only in the American religious landscape but also in various Muslim countries throughout the world. As Peter Berger and his colleagues have illustrated, there is throughout the world a resurgence of conservative religious frames of meaning for hundreds of millions of religious adherents throughout the globe. Secularization, as Rodney Stark has claimed, is dead (Stark, 1999). Berger retracted his secularization thesis, so famous from his book The Sacred Canopy.

What this "new world order" of reactionary religion offers is certainty. In the traditional description of the rise of fundamentalism, an old trope has been used.

Modernity is characterized as a time of upheaval and uncertainty (most famously addressed by Wuthnow). This comes from a long history of scholarship outlining how the alienated temporal perspective of modernity, with its displacement from the bosom of Gemeinschaft to the emptiness of Gesellschaft as outlined by Tonnies (1961) and its concomitant bleak Durkheimian anomie, motivates a person to retreat from the overabiding ambiance of uncertainty (Durkheim, 1973). From our theoretical and historical perspective that engages a long legacy of writing, certainty then presents itself as a particularly non-modern accent to reality. We argue that certainty introduces itself as actually a value coming from the enlightenment, from modernity. Sociological discourse then finds its limitation on countering these reactionary movements because sociology cannot argue or define what "faith" is. Sociology is then hampered to correct or critique reactionary religion. An appeal to theology must be made.

What the sociologist Adam Seligman has suggested sociologically (see Modernity's Wager), although nuanced with the claims of tradition in his back pocket, is that contemporary religion's stress on certainty is not a traditional appeal to the quest for truth from an orthodox religious point of view. Certainty is a modern construct. When religious reactionaries speak and argue for the certainty of end times or of the certainty of reactionary principles, they are borrowing from modern constructs. Seligman suggests that modern "religious" certainty is a reaction to secular and atheist scientific seeking for certainty. One quest for certainty implies a reactionary quest for certainty. From an orthodox Catholic perspective, truth is faith-seeking understanding--not certainty. Or from a Buddhist perspective, the Buddha stressed that his teachings should never be taken in confidence as a kind of certainty, but the practitioner should always test those beliefs through measured experience.

What Seligman asserts in an earlier work, The Problem of Trust, is that the New Age spiritualist's or the fundamentalist's "trust in God" is really a faith or confidence based on the certainty of role expectations. This "trust" in God is not trust at all, but is really confidence leaning toward certainty, or reliance on role performance. It is explicitly not faith. And what we argue is that in this unfaith, hope cannot be present either for both faith and hope require the transcendent unknown.

The "truth" of "religious" apocalyptic narratives is then masked in certainty, which does not come from a traditional rendering of the nature of truth. Rather, it has taken on a modern form. Kafka had observed this tendency as a condition of modernity:

  Truth is permanently on the point of taking off its mask and
  revealing itself as illusion, illusion in constant danger of being
  verified as truth. It is the predicament of a man who, endowed
  with an insatiable appetite for transcendental certainty, finds
  himself in a world robbed of all spiritual possessions. (3)

This quest for transcendent certainty despiritualizes the world. Lingering in this critique is an awareness of the projection of modernity's increasing rationalization of the life world, and it echoes Weber's eerie prediction of the resulting "iron cage" and disenchantment as constituent of capitalist culture. (4) This approach to "religious" truth-as-transcendental certainty is just another element of the washing away of traditional spirituality. Modern apocalypticisni as realization of the "moment" is certainty, not hope. Fundamentalist and reactionary "nostalgia" is a false one. Stark and others have explored how the memory of Christian Sittlichkeit to be found in centuries past is a false construction. Sociologically and demographically speaking, church attendance and religious belief were not markedly higher in generations past, and the trajectory of modernity as the progress of secularization is largely a myth constructed by the religious right.

From a social psychological point of view, taken from Marcuse, modernity's search for certainty presents itself as a collective narcissistic need for a false transcendence. In response to the frustration of the eras-urge to collapse others into our narcissistic realm of certainty, moderns react with thanatos-urge. Postmodern political and religious narratives of apocalypses are exactly this enjoyment of the thanatos-urge of destruction. But not only are postmodern apocalyptic religious urges an example of postmodernity. The New Age movement of turning toward an inner feeling of Gnostic experience and searching as legitimation also seeks a kind of self-driven certainty. This is also anti-tradition.

So, the sociologist argues that traditional renderings of faith and hope are the only way out of this frustrating matrix of secular and "religious" forms of certainty. We see now as a necessary time for the retrieval of the social phenomenon of hope in Schutz and Luckmann's sense: a phenomenologically transcendent symbolic realm not reducible to means and objects at hand and instrumental relations. Hope is for something not seen, not for pre-emptive strikes or apocalypse, anti-utopias. Perhaps Augustine is a resource for an apologia for the appeal of faith with exclusively other-worldly expectations. Faced with the death of his friend Nebridius, Augustine concludes that it is unhealthy to store any faith or hope in anything that is transient:

  Black grief closed over my heart and wherever I looked I saw only
  death. My native land was a torment to me, and my father's house
  unbelievable misery. Everything I had shared with my friend turned
  into hideous anguish without him. My eyes sought him everywhere,
  but he was missing. (5)

  For wheresoever a human soul turns, it can but cling to what
  brings sorrow unless it turns to you, cling though it may to
  beautiful things outside you. ... they arise and sink; in their
  rising they begin to exist and grow toward their perfection, but
  once perfect they grow old and perish. (6)

If Augustine is right, then we should only find faith and hope in things that are intransient and certain. God is the only thing that is permanent. But this is not Augustine's final point. In his meditations on love, so beautifully expostulated in Hannah Arendt's Love and Saint Augustine, we are to be guided by outwardly directed charity, caritas, and that completes Christian identity. This means risk beyond certainty--faith and hope beyond what is known. Arendt, probably influenced by Augustine in her later work, The Human Condition, defines Jesus' philosophy of forgiveness as a political virtue to make the possibility of pluralism and what she calls natality in the space of societal operations. It is driven by caritas. Arendt confirms this through the hope of forgiveness: that without forgiveness we are victims and thrown into the unhappy experience of necessity. (7) And as C. S. Lewis, commenting on Augustine, states about Jesus' teaching of caritas in response to Augustine's observations following the death of Nebridius, "I am sure that His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investment and limited liabilities." (8) Charity, as Lewis defines it, involves risk. Certainty is not a part of faith. Hope implies an unknown. Faith, as in the Pauline formula, is in things not seen. And with human relationships, it suggests the openness of role negotiability, not the implied aims of mutual destruction.

Hope is incarnational and does not cast the stranger as other. Hope is pluralistic. Hope is, like Arendt described it, natality and renewal. As Gabriel Marcel has written, "Hope is. ... the availability of a soul which has entered. ... into the experience of a communion to accomplish in the teeth of will and knowledge the transcendent act--the act establishing the vital regeneration." (9) Hope demands an anchoring in practice, which is open to the pluralism of community. As Fr. Mile Babic, a Croatian peace activist during the 1990s war in Bosnian articulated,

"Destruction of the other is idolatry, for man is made in God's image." (10) Traditional hope affirms the existence of the other. Hope then becomes the ground for civilization to take place. It is hope involving a risk to love one's enemies, not to destroy them. From a Muslim perspective, suicide bombing then is not a religious mandate, but as one religious Palestinian remarked to me, it is "an anti-religion of despair." As Marcel addressed this, the suicide bomber is violent because of a despairing "consciousness of time as closed or. ... as a prison." (11) Escape to a otherworldly state is then necessary. This is precisely so because the certainty of destruction and the religious impulse of hope are not traditionally bound together. The suicide bomber is solitary and acts in solitude, whereas "hope is always associated with a communion. . . that one wonders if despair and solitude are not at bottom necessarily identical." (12) This kind of other-worldly hope of destruction should remain just that, "other-worldly."

Fundamentalist realization of prophecy is a fallacy of misplaced concreteness: translating what is only constituted as other-worldly hope into a material this-worldly hope. By contrast, religious (not fundamentalist) hope is conceived of in the praxis of this-worldly relationships, in doing deeds of service, charity, and justice. As it outlines in the Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament, God's reign is always at hand for his people; but in history, it is never fully realized. (Isaiah 56:1): "Thus said the Lord: Observe what is right and do what is just; For soon My salvation shall come, and my deliverance be revealed." God is revealing, to be revealed, but never fully revealed. Salvation is always near and at hand, but never in our hands. In this "waiting without seeing," the prophet encourages acts of justice and charity in preparation for this coming, or tzedekah in Hebrew, and then outlines the parameters for different mitzvot. Tzedakah is the Hebrew word meaning both justice and charity. On this dimension, chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom Jonathan Sacks quotes Rabbi Johann:

  Wherever you find the greatness of the Holy One, blessed be He,
  there too you will find His humility. ... Thus it is written in
  the Torah, Tor the Lord your God is the God of gods and Lord of
  lords, the great, mighty and awesome God. ... ' and immediately
  afterwards it says, 'He upholds the cause of the fatherless and
  widow, and loves the stranger, giving him food and clothing.' (13)

In this, there is a call of extension of self to other and an incarnational hope of praxis within the world, rather than calling for its destruction. Rabbi Johanan continues, "Likewise it says in the Prophets, `Thus speaks the High and exalted One... I live in a high and holy place but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and the heart of the contrite."' For Sacks, greatness connects with humility and this-worldly service. God's actions are also those of compassion, and this is the hope of projected trust: toward community of the real and tending to existence as it presents itself, while future may be unknown.

Rabbi Sacks continues:

  Greatness, even for God, certainly for us, is not to be above
  people but to be with them, hearing their silent cry, sharing
  their distress, bringing comfort to the distressed and dignity to
  the deprived. The message of the Hebrew Bible is that
  civilizations survive not by strength but by how they respond to
  the weak; not by wealth but how they care for the poor; not by
  power but by their concern for the powerless. What renders a
  culture invulnerable is the compassion it shows to the vulnerable.
  (14)

For Sacks, who is strongly influenced by the religious humanism of Maimonides, the religious vocation is a call to attention to the vulnerable and work of this world. It is hope invested in the world, not digesting and consuming it on the one hand, or dismissing it for another realm on the other. In Judaism of the Tanakh, God is in an active sense coming, revealing, but never revealed. In that waiting, we are left to do deeds of justice and charity. In a Christian New Testament perspective, as the letter of Paul to the Romans states, we are saved in hope, a hope, like tzedekah, which points to practice in waiting for the unseen: "For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one also hope for what he sees?" (Romans 8:24). Hope in Paul is exactly about things that are not certain, and not ultimately driven by our actions. This is in contrast to both fundamentalist hope for the apocalypse which action is taken to bring about, and also secular optimism that works toward achievement through willful action. Why hope for something if all signs are pointing to its occurrence? One need not hope. Hope is utterly transcendent for it points to waiting for something that is not driven by the will of humans. In this way, the message of Paul is in strict opposition to the realization and reification of a Christianity based on the book of Revelation. Revelation realized is not hope in Paul's sense. The Left Behind series and Armageddonists who feed and fuel the conflict in Israel-Palestine look to God's revelation in history or actualization in society and are willingly bringing about "God" in a certain form of Gnosticism that denies God's transcendence and God's own action.

Fundamentalists are at work in bringing about God's action, thus denying the transcendent power of God to work on his own. For another example, America's conservative right wing's policy that ineffectively preached abstinence in Africa to solve the AIDS crisis relocates the problem of other-worldly salvation in policy-writing and in that process produced a sadly ineffective policy which did no work of true justice in the world. It translates and misplaces a salvific system onto a social problem, which requires a pragmatic human solution--and thus proves to be a "salvific system" introduced to only make the pragmatic problem worse. So it is ultimately other-worldly hope that is not necessarily what is damaging but the realization of God's kingdom on earth or the thought that we can through our own willful action fulfill God's kingdom on earth, so that there is the translation of other-worldly salvific categories into this-worldly actualization. Thus, salvation is, for non-fundamentalist Christians, construed as this-worldly being forgiven, which then propels the Christian to do acts of charity in the world (here on earth, and restoring people to God's fellowship to work in the world). Salvation here (in forgiveness) points God's people to work for an unrealizable kingdom of heaven, justice, on earth--every goal (of justice) points to another beyond it.

The religious writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer express a this-worldly oriented hope in faith that is toward the "unseen." Bonhoeffer, in prison awaiting execution for the assassination attempt on Hitler during World War II--in a place of helplessness, vulnerability, and utterly without optimism--writes in a letter to Eberhard Bethge:

  During the last year or so I've come to know and understand more
  and more the profound this-worldliness of Christianity. The
  Christian is not a homo religiosus, but simply a man, as Jesus was
  a man--in contrast, shall we say, to John the Baptist. I don't mean
  the shallow and banal this-worldliness of the enlightened, the
  busy, the comfortable, or the lascivious, but the profound this-
  worldliness, characterized by discipline and the constant
  knowledge of death and resurrection. I think Luther lived a this-
  worldly life in this sense. (15)

This articulation of this-worldly hope is also an image of "religion without religion:" a transcendence of action as opposed to a Gnostic realization of God in the world in things seen (which represents Religion with a capital R). The humility of Jesus as "simply a man" denies the power of realization of projected futures that both secular humanism realizes in optimism or projected environmental apocalypses and fundamentalisms yield in clash of civilizations politics.

For Boenhoeffer, the Christian calling is a calling to this-worldly action, and the deaths and sufferings involved in this vocation. Bonhoeffer goes on in the same letter,

  I discovered later, and I'm still discovering right up to this
  moment, that is it only by living completely in this world that
  one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt
  to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a
  converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!), a
  righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one.
  By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life's duties,
  problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities.
  In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God,
  taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the
  world--watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is
  faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a man and a
  Christian (cf. Jer. 45!). How can success make us arrogant, or
  failure lead us astray, when we share in God's sufferings through
  a life of this kind? (16)

For Bonhoeffer, the death of "Christianity" with a capital C is a death to frames of other-worldly certainty and complete immersion in vulnerability of this world's concerns.

By extension, one could argue that it is in these ways--other-worldly certainty--a good Marxist would observe religion transforming itself into the opium of the masses, the utterance of complete alienation and disembodiment. Where Augustine runs away from death to the arms of the creator, Bonhoeffer confronts death in the cross. But it is in Bonhoeffer's definition of Christianity as "vulnerability in the world," and Sacks' emphasis on the central place of tzedekah within Judaism that religion propels itself into practice and action, as Freire observes in The Pedagogy of Hope; thus, it preserves itself from becoming the opiate of an empty ideology. The maintenance of this-worldly hope reflects a pragmatic spirit of difference and concern with this-worldly affairs of justice, loving-kindness, and charity. If Paul, so oft quoted for his praise of "by faith alone," were to be asked about the essence of Christianity, which perhaps he defines in I Corinthians 13, he outlines the three elements of Christian life, so often and famously quoted at wedding ceremonies, "And now abide faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." Charity, or love, as action in the world, is a corrective against religion becoming an opium or ideology. And it is how charity and hope abide with each other in this-worldly vulnerability that outlines the religious narrative, as opposed to the fundamentalist narrative on the one hand and scientific narratives on the other, both of which so heavily rely upon the cognitive constructs of "faith as certainty." This-worldly religious hope tends to the "non-certitudinous" as it is empirical and reformable by the resistances of the natural world, whereas otherworldly hope tends to the certitudinous as it is mythical and faithin-alternative-symbolic-universe.

Except for Erikson's (17) definition, which suggests hope's transcendence beyond the material conditions of the here and now, most sociological and psychological definitions of hope do not differentiate between hope based on feelings of other-worldly visions that are realizable, and hope that exists beyond these circumstances. Perhaps the sociological and psychological definitions of hope follow an analysis based in the vein of modernity's wager--in a realm that defies transcendence of conditions of the rational biological self. This is what probably leads the psychological definition down the path toward hope in view of agency; surely from a theological point of view, hope is possible without agency. That is the very grounding of our phenomenological definitions of hope: that is hope for things which are not seen. Further, other psychological evidence provides mechanisms for approaching hope as it transcends optimism and material conditions. This is precisely the vulnerability of religious hope, as opposed to fundamentalist hope or sociological/psychological hope (secular optimism). Religious hope is precisely for the things not seen, precisely in the time when the world is in need of miracles. According to Marcel, the peculiarity of hope is that it "tends inevitably to transcend the particular objects to which it at first seems to be attached." (18) Once one hopes that the world will come to an end and works toward that goal, there is a constriction on hope. Hope is profoundly open and incarnational. Hoping for end time, therefore, is not hope, but optimism led by a destructive solitary despair of an us-versus-them mentality.

Works cited

Arendt, Hannah, 1998a, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Arendt, Hannah, 1998b, Love and Saint Augustine, J.C. Stark, and J. Vechiarelli-Scott, eds., Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Augustine, St., 1998, Confessions, IV, Translated by Maria Boudling, New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics.

Babic, Mile, 2002, "Violence Is Founded on Idolatry," Reconstruction and Deconstruction: Forum Bosnae, Vol. 15. Sarajevo: International Forum Bosnia.

Berger, Peter, 1967, The Sacred Canopy, Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

Berger, Peter (ed.), 1999, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 1971, Letters and Papers from Prison, New York: MacMillan.

Diamond, James, 2004, "The Post-Secular: A Jewish Perspective," CrossCurrents 53(4), pp. 580-606.

Durkheim, Emile, 1973, On Morality and Society, Edited with an Introduction by Robert Bellah, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Freire, Paolo, 1998, Pedagogy of Hope, London: Continuum.

Fukuyama, Francis, 1992, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Free Press.

Godfrey, Joseph John, 1987, A Philosophy of Human Hope, Dordecht: Martinus Nijhoff Press.

Gusterson, Hugh, 2004, People of the Bomb, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Hunter, James Davison, 1991, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, New York: Basic Books.

Huntington, Samuel, 1996, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, New York: Simon and Schuster.

Lewis, C.S., 1991, The Four Loves, San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Inc.

Marcel, Gabriel, 1962, Homo Viator: An Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope, translated by Emma Craufurd, New York: Harper and Row.

Marcuse, Herbert, 1974, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophic Inquiry into Freud, Boston: Beacon Press.

Rasinski, K. A., Berktold, J., Smith, T., and Albertson, B., 2003, "A Follow-up to a National Study of the Public Response to the September 11th Attacks," National Opinion Research Center (NORC): University of Chicago. http://www.norc.org/projects/reaction/ pubresp2.pdf.

Sacks, Jonathan, 2005, To Heal a Fractured World, New York: Schocken Books.

Schutz, Alfred, and Luckmann, Thomas, 1989, The Structures of the Life World, Translated by R. M. Zaner and H. T. Engelhardt Jr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Seligman, Adam B, 1997, The Problem of Trust, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Seligman, Adam B., 2000, Modernity's Wager: Authority, Self and Transcendence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Stark, Rodney, 1999, "Secularization, R.I.P," Sociology of Religion 60(3), pp. 249-73.

Tolson, Jay, 2007, "A Return to Tradition: A New Interest in Old Ways Takes Root in Catholicism and many other Faiths/A Return to Ritual: Why Many Modern Worshipers, Including Catholics, Jews, and Evangelicals, Are Embracing Tradition," U.S. News and World Report, pp. 42-48.

Tonnies, Ferdinand, 1961, "Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft," in Talcott Parsons, ed., Theories of Society: Foundations of Modern Sociological Theory. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, pp. 191201.

Weber, Max, 2003, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons. Mineola, NY: Dover.

Wuthnow, Robert, 1989, Communities of Discourse: Ideology and Social Structure in the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and European Socialism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Notes

(1.) See Rasinski et al. 2003. "A Follow-up to a National Study of the Public Response to the September 11th Attacks." National Opinion Research Center (NORC): University of Chicago. http://www.norc.org/projects/reaction/pubresp2.pdf.

(2.) See Jay Tolson, "A Return to Tradition: A New interest in old ways takes root in Catholicism and many other faiths/A Return to Ritual: Why Many modern worshipers, including Catholics, Jews, and Evangelicals, are embracing tradition." U.S. News and World Report: December 24, 2007, 42-48.

(3.) From "The Castle" in James Diamond, "The Post-Secular: A Jewish Perspective" Cross-Currents. 53:4 (Winter 2004).

(4.) Max Weber. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003, 181.

(5.) St. Augustine, Confessions, IV, 4.9, translated by Maria Boudling, New York: Vintage Spiritual Classics, 1998, 59.

(6.) St. Augustine. Confessions. IV. 10, 63.

)7.) Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 236-247.

(8.) C.S. Lewis. The Four Loves. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Inc., 1991, 120.

(9.) Gabriel Marcel, in, Joseph John Godfrey. A Philosophy of Human Hope. Dordecht: Martinus Nijhoff Press, 1987, 125.

(10.) Mile BabiL "Violence Is Founded on Idolatry," Reconstruction and Deconstruction: Forum Bosnae 15. Sarajevo: International Forum Bosnia, 2002.

(11.) Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope. New York: Harper and Row, 1962, 53.

(12.) Marcel, Homo Viator, 58.

(13.) Jonathan Sacks. To Heal a Fractured World, New York: Schocken Books, 2005, 36.

(14.) Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World, 37.

(15.) July 21, 1944. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Letters and Papers from Prison, edited by Eberhard Bethge. New York: MacMillan, 1971, 369.

(16.) Bonhoeffer, Letters, 369-370.

(17.) Erikson defines hope as "the enduring belief in the attainability of fervent wishes, in spite of the dark urges and rages which mark the beginnings of existence." Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope, 42.

(18.) Marcel in Godfrey, A Philosophy of Human Hope, 109.

Sarah MacMillen*

*The author thanks Andrew Weigert for introducing her to the topic and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame for sponsoring the early stages of the research.