Reimagining Hope as an Intergenerational and Relational Virtue

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.