Love's Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis [Hardcover]

A moving exploration of the place of hope in the world today, drawing on agrarian principles
 
In this series of meditations, Norman Wirzba recasts hope not as something people have, like a vaccine to prevent pain and trouble, but as something people do. Hope evaporates in conditions of abandonment and abuse. It grows in contexts of nurture and belonging. Hope ignites when people join in what Wendell Berry calls “love’s braided dance”—a commitment to care for one another and our world.
 
Through personal narratives and historical examples, Wirzba explores what sustains hope and why it so often seems absent from our vision of the future. The vitality of hope, he maintains, depends on a collective commitment to care for the physical world (its soils and waters, plants and animals, homes and neighborhoods) and to promote the moral, aesthetic, and spiritual ideals that affirm life as good, beautiful, and sacred.
 
Engaging with such contemporary topics as climate change, AI and social media, and the intensifying refugee crises and drawing on the wisdom of James Baldwin, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Martha Graham, and others, Wirzba offers a powerful argument for hope as a way of life in which people are intimately and practically joined with all the living.A moving exploration of the place of hope in the world today, drawing on agrarian principles“Wirzba’s book finds its strength in its lack of naivete and its consistent ability to provide practical and lasting application of a possibly ethereal theory. . . . Hope, one might say, is a scarce commodity, but under Wirzba’s rubric, hope is neither scarce nor a commodity, as long as we understand what it truly is, and are willing to cultivate it.”—Justin Cober-Lake,Englewood Review of Books

“Wirzba encourages readers to find ways to embrace a rooted and hopeful stance even in modlÓQ