The Future of Hope
The Possibility of Hope in the 21st Century
Professor Judith A Merkle author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:18th Feb '27
£65.00
This title is due to be published on 18th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Examines the traditional notion of hope under the new circumstances of the secular world and asks questions of its future and its possibility in human life.
This book offers selected theological, sociological, psychological and philosophical perspectives on hope to stir its possibility in today’s church and secular society.
Merkle addresses the experience of hope: the ordinary, everyday human hopes and historical hopes which impact what we hold to be important and give direction to the general meaning of our lives. Engaging with a number of theologians who treat the relationship between humanism and ultimate hope in their depiction of the Christian life, Merkle identifies hope and its counterfeits. She examines the relationship of freedom and hope and the modern shift in a theology of hope that includes the range of desires for emancipation operative in the human family.
Merkle discusses a wide number of important issues such as: the relationship between faith and ideology, human anthropology and its role in secular society, and models of conversion in their relationship to hope. She reflects on the significance of the parable of the talents in secular society, as well as scrutinizes the transformation and requirements of synodality as movements of hope in the church.
Judith Merkle’s book develops a profound and engaged argument on the meaning of hope in our day. Merkle draws on philosophy, theology and the social sciences to reflect on hope as essential to our humanity and to consider how hope is lived and practiced in the contemporary Church. * Robert Gascoigne, Australian Catholic University, Australia *
Like a middle child, hope has received less attention than its sibling theological virtues, faith and love, in the past, but we really need it now as well as during the coming decades of social, political, economic, environmental, and religious uncertainty. As a senior theologian and wise friend, Judith A. Merkle has always encouraged me and has consistently inspired the hope I needed to continue on. So too her latest book gives me hope that hope has a future in this chaotic century * Tobias Winright, St Patrick's Pontifical University, Ireland *
ISBN: 9780567727114
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
200 pages