Introduction: A pebble in the mouth and a boulder on the horizon

The trademark virtue of Newheiser (2019)Hope in a Secular Age is how it simultaneously carries on conversations with a multitude of scholars and discourses. Something would be worrisome if it did not. No work can approach the theme of hope in the 21st century without a nuance and complexity that removes it from charges of both obliviousness and nihilism. As the respondents in this symposium note in their respective ways, hope has been hard to discover and/or muster (depending on how you understand it) in recent years. From the gnarls of the COVID-19 pandemic to the brutalities of the Trump administration, not to mention the increasing effects of climate change, and the rise of authoritarianisms all over the globe, it seems that the more we look for hope, the less there is to be found. Newheiser is not blind to this paradox. In some sense, he makes it the basis for a contemporary sense of hope. As AndrewWillis notes in “The Elusiveness of Hope,” for Newheiser hope seems to be something akin to “acceptance without resignation,” a steely gaze into the despicable conditions of our time that refuses to surrender to them. ForWillis, it is this determination to affirm a future “we cannot grasp” that provides the ground for “ethical transformation.” A persistence that leads to discipline. However, for Marius Mjaaland, there is an open question as to whether or not hope is a matter of willfulness or discipline. Like Willis (2021), and Mjaaland (2021) sees Newheiserian hope as “a quest for possibility even when there are no viable options.” But he disagrees on how we might arrive at it. Neither a function of the will, nor the result of self-discipline, for Mjaaland hope is rather a gift that emerges from the suspension of the will in expectation of an unexpected possibility. In a less critical review, Michelle Flores applauds Newheiser for refusing to ground hope in a false sense of certainty. By taking the shifting grounds of both secularity and theology into consideration, Flores sees Newheiser’s approach as fittingly careful, without resorting to fecklessness. “Hope,” she writes, “is what refuses to settle for, among other things, the stability of the divine-political analogy” (Sanchez 2021). Anna Rowlands takes a similar angle in her reading of Newheiser. For her, Newheiser’s approach represents “A political theology that takes its secularity and religiosity seriously,” thereby providing the basis for “ethical negativity as the grounds of a political theology” (Rowland 2021).