This talk is by David McGlouchlin, Emeritus Fellow in Christian Theology.

If we look out over the present situation: the recent pandemic, global warming, shifting weather patterns, rising seas, wild fires, loss of biodiversity, wars in Ukraine, Gaza, the Gulf. Eleven current civil wars, millions of displaced peoples and migrants, oppressed communities like the Uighurs detained in Chinese re-education camps... It can be hard to sustain hope as the daily news hits us.

There are approaches to hope we could take starting from literature and poetry perhaps most famously An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope 1733-4 “Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is but always to be blest.” Or Philosophical – the atheist Marxist Ernst Bloch’s three volume The Hope Principle. Or the new discipline of the psychology of Hope, with research on how hope impacts on education, work, health and community well-being and techniques for improving it. All of the above would be interesting places to start our discussion of Hope.

But what is the Source of Our Hope? Specifically the hope we have as disciples of Jesus. The source of our Hope is much more ancient. So my treatment will focus on the Jewish and Christian Scriptures and the hope of the communities that produced them and that still celebrate and live out of them today.