Liz Bucar, the comparative religious ethicist, recently called feminist activist and chronicler Rebecca Solnit “one of the most important religious thinkers in America right now.” Fond of quoting the theologian Walter Brueggemann on the interlocking functions of memory and hope, Solnit is actively looking for “anchors in a deeper past and hope for a kind of stability and a deeper relationship to the old stories and the past.” According to Bucar, this constitutes “a theology of tradition” that has the capacity to make strange bedfellows in any number of social reform movements. This panel convenes to test this thesis. Panelists accelerate conversations about social responsibility among religious practitioners and conceive the kinds of spiritual exercises that best prime us to cope with long-term challenges such as climate change, entrenched identity-based animuses, economic disruptions posed by changing technologies like artificial intelligence, and so on.
This paper describes the short shrift historical injustices like slavery receive in Rorty’s philosophy of social hope. Rorty’s narrative arc of the United States turns on the notion that philosophers migrated from the revolutionary vanguard to the academy. No longer the primary drivers of social change, twentieth (and twenty-first) century philosophers have to build coalitions in order to achieve their long-term vision of “a classless and casteless society”. However, Rorty’s brand of obstinate liberalism does not consider the potential and proven value of theologically-minded social reformers. Slave redress is not a bygone concern if we seriously range the threat to the social order posed by anarchists, postliberals, and “technofeudalists” like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin. A sudden and rapid infusion to the American middle-class is the kind of stabilizing project that should interest heirs of Enlightenment principles. And yet that kind of backward-looking reflection does not sit well with Rorty’s conditional utopianism. Bringing our peers in philosophy departments to bear on the material turn among Black Theologians is itself a worthwhile goal for the comparative religious ethicist. This paper thus bridges theorists of social hope with the kinds of community-minded practitioners that place a similar premium on political stability.
This paper argues that Richard Rorty’s philosophy of social hope may inadvertently generate the resentment it seeks to abrogate. In diagnosing the erosion of hope within the academy, Rorty recommends subordinating religious commitments to a “greater” civic good, a move that risks alienating large segments of the American public for whom religion remains morally constitutive. Contemporary prison abolitionists such as Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore often draw upon Marxist-inflected frameworks that similarly marginalize religion’s role in sustaining utopian imagination, even as they draw from religious inspiration. This tension constrains the broader appeal of abolitionist justice. While the for-profit prison system represents a profound injustice incapable of reform, any viable utopian vision must address those who perpetrate egregious physical violence; absent such reckoning, many citizens perceive not hope but instability. Unlike Marx or Rorty, John Rawls integrates religion into his account of a “realistic utopia,” treating comprehensive doctrines as legitimate moral sources. His proceduralism offers a shared framework through which comparative religious ethicists might enable religious communities and activists to translate, negotiate, and coordinate their commitments within a fractured public sphere.
A central argument of Philosophy and Social Hope is that we must learn to do without many concepts that have previously structured philosophical inquiry. In making this case, Rorty regularly replaces or redefines philosophical terms with a reference to the future. Truth, for example, has no meaning except as an orientation of inquiry to a possible future. He makes a similar move regarding wonder, which Aristotle says is the beginning of philosophy. He argues that pragmatists transfer the wonder and mystery that Greek and Abrahamic traditions found in the nonhuman world to the human future (51-52). This paper critically analyzes this displacement of wonder. These religious and philosophical traditions offer, in Rorty's terms, "tools" of wonder at the nonhuman world. As the world and its multispecies communities are increasingly remade the image and (short-term) interests of humans, the cultivation of our tools of wonder may be crucial in the effort to learn to live as parts of earth's multispecies communities -- and in the effort to build hopes for a future other than one marked by human technological domination.
This paper explores the role of anger and courage in fostering social hope within climate justice movements. Departing from a quote often attributed to Augustine, the paper explores Hope’s “two beautiful daughters: Anger at what is, and Courage to make it different” as an antidote to climate fatalism. This paper argues that climate fatalism must be resisted not because the position is wrong, but because it too easily lends itself to white-supremacist eco-fascist ideologies. Indeed, “acceptance” of the inevitable destructive effects of climate disaster pushes many toward draconian survivalist mentalities. Ecofascists embrace this kind of climate fatalism as they advocate for the elimination of Black and Brown bodies as necessary to ensure the survival of white lives as global resources grow slimmer due to climate change. For this reason, ethicists and scholars ought to resist climate fatalism at every juncture. Citing both secular and religious climate justice movements, this paper advocates exchanging climate fatalism for climate rage to cultivate social hope, even if the data shows the situation is hopeless.
Contemporary psychological accounts often define hope in terms of individual agency and goal attainment, thereby limiting their capacity to address intergenerational injustice, ecological precarity, and moral fragmentation. This paper advances a relational and intergenerational account of hope through a Two-Eyed Seeing dialogue between Anishinaabe moral epistemology and theological ethics. The Anishinaabe are an Indigenous people of the Great Lakes region of North America, whose moral traditions emphasize relationality, responsibility, and continuity across generations. Centering Anishinaabe relational ontologies—particularly the Seven Generations principle—hope is reframed as a moral commitment grounded in belonging and future-oriented care. Philosophical-theological resources from Joseph Pieper, Jürgen Moltmann, and Abraham Joshua Heschel serve as critical interlocutors, challenging dominant Western conceptions of hope in moral education.