• Living into Hope: Joan Brown Campbell ponders the role that hope plays in the challenges facing Christian communities and the world's religions.
  • The Optimist Creed: Christian D. Larson offers a peon of praise to those who are hopeful and look on the bright side of things.
  • Active Hope: Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone present hope as an antidote to the spiritual emergencies of our time.
  • Authentic Hope: Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer provides strong proof that it's time to exit dead-end roads and discover alternate pathways of hope into the future.
  • Perseverance: Margaret J. Wheatley explores the spiritual value and many meanings of perseverance and hope.
  • A House for Hope: John A. Buehrens and Rebecca Ann Parker provide ideas and practices to resurrect hope and progressive religion in America.
  • Soul of a Citizen: Paul Loeb shares stories of ordinary people who have been beacons of hope in their communities.
  • God Has a Dream: Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu's eloquent writing will resurrect hope in your heart.
  • Bethlehem Besieged: Mitri Raheb, a Lutheran minister and Arab who lives in Bethlehem, shares his vision for peace in the Middle East and moves toward the future with hope.
  • Ordinary Resurrections: Jonathan Kozol finds hope in the resiliency of poor children in the South Bronx and their inspiring teachers.
  • Hope Notes: R. Wayne Willis presents inspiring stories and quotations on the spiritual faculty of hope.
  • Growing Hope: Sue Patton Thoele believes that each of us carries within our hearts the seeds of enduring hope, but they require conscious effort and committed action to grow.
  • Hunting for Hope: Scott Russell Sanders, a father of two, gives his reasons for being hopeful about the future.
  • Circles of Hope: Karen Lynn Williams is the author of a delightful and inspiring children's picture book about the lift that hope and generosity provide.
  • Speaking with Authority: Mary Catherine Hilkert focuses on the inspirational legacy of Catherine of Siena as a companion in hope for those yearning for gender equality and spiritual renewal.
  • Death and Beyond: Andrew M. Greeley's book is a succinct, well-reasoned, and appealing tome on death that defends the belief in hope.

Fiction

Barbara Kingsolver's novel Animal Dreams is about a woman named Codi who after 15 years of wandering returns to Grace, Arizona, to look after her widowed father, who is in the first stages of Alzheimer's disease. She takes a job teaching high school biology and resumes a relationship with Loyd, a Native American she dated as a teenager.

Codi is trying to figure out what to do with her life, and she has a suspicion that what she does will determine who she is. She wonders if she can be like her idealistic younger sister Hallie who is helping poor farmers in Nicaraqua. In a letter, she says to Codi: "The very least you can do is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof."

For Codi, this happens when she and her students discover that a mining company has not only polluted the town river but is planning another ecologically disastrous move which will have dire effects on the community. Working with a ladies sewing club, she finds a cause worthy of her commitment.

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