I began writing Hope in a Secular Age during the Obama years, and I finished it midway through Donald Trump’s first term as US President. Since then, it has become clearer than ever that hope is difficult but indispensable. Faced with democratic decline, ecological catastrophe, and crushing inequality, we have many reasons to be pessimistic. In conversation with my respondents, I am grateful for the challenge to think more deeply about what hope means now (2026), at a time when autocrats and oligarchs are consolidating control.
The key claim of my book is that hope is a discipline of persistent desire. We hope for things we want but do not have: to say “I hope…” is to acknowledge that the object of hope may not come to fruition. Some of my respondents wonder whether my account of hope is overly positive while others worry that it is overly negative, foreclosing the assurance that people need. Since I see hope as an alternative to complacency and despair, it strikes me as a good sign that the book has raised questions from both directions. In my view, by sustaining affirmation while facing uncertainty, hope sustains social movements that resist authoritarianism with creativity and courage.
Concretizing Hope
Since hope is a risky thing, I think it is for each person to judge what hopes to hold. Still, since hope has profound importance for actual lives, I am grateful that Ted Vial has pressed me to make things more concrete. Vial begins by situating my book in the classroom, and he ends by imagining me as a Foucauldian spiritual director, helping my readers to nurture hope in the face of racism, misogyny, and environmental devastation. With the work of a teacher in mind, Vial asks me to say more about the practices that enable hope to persist.
My argument develops in conversation with Dionysius the Areopagite and Jacques Derrida because I believe they exemplify important features of hope. However, they are only examples of a practice that takes many different forms. In Foucauldian terms, I see my approach as closer to Cynic than Epicurean parrhesia—aiming to provoke the reader’s freedom rather than prescribe their behavior. Still, since Vial asks for other examples—”beyond academics, at a more personal level”—here’s a vignette to clarify what I mean.
Three years ago, around the time I received the responses for this symposium, I was hit by a car while cycling in my neighborhood. The impact left me with a persistent migraine that affected every aspect of my life. For the first few months, even casual conversation would make my headache unbearably worse. For most of a year, I was unable to read for any length of time. For much longer than that, I felt myself to be subtly out of sync.
In the year following my accident, there were times when hope seemed out of reach. Although I benefit from the support of many people, I discovered that chronic pain makes every relationship harder. Especially in those early months, as I sat for hours fogged with pain, it felt as if I had lost myself. I lived the uncertainty I describe in the book, unsure whether I would ever return to the life I had loved. At the same time, as Vial suggests, I found practices that nurtured my capacity to persist.
There were days when eating soup from a friend was all I could manage. Over time, receiving care of this kind helped me muster the will to do a bit more. When scholarly work was beyond me, I focused on organizing with my union. Although my capacities were altered, the experience of solidarity brought me to think differently about my own agency. By letting go of the patterns I had come to expect, I came to re-imagine what my life is for.
This story is so personal and prosaic that I hesitate to share it here. Still, Vial asked for an example, and my own experience is what I know best. For me, hope takes shape through an ecology of practice that includes reading, writing, praying, dancing, organizing, and eating (among many other things). Others will find that hope lives in other ways. To my mind, the key point is that hope enables us to face our vulnerability by living into the unknown.
Democracy and Hierarchy
In the book, I draw on Dionysius as a resource for democratic theory. However, as Eva Braunstein observes, this gesture is counterintuitive. I think Braunstein is right that Dionysius describes a stratified order that invites esoteric elitism. Like her, I think there’s a tension between democratic contestation and Dionysius’s vision of divinely sanctioned order. Rather than explaining away these features of Dionysius’s writings, they stand at the center of my argument—I simply interpret their significance differently.
My interpretation of Dionysius focuses on the tension between the anarchic negativity of The Mystical Theology and the rigidity of the Dionysian hierarchies. Some readers attempt to resolve this tension by prioritizing one side or the other, but I think these attempts fail. Dionysius affirms hierarchical order while demanding, at the same time, “an undivided and absolute abandonment of yourself and everything.” Since Dionysius does not exempt hierarchy from this critical principle, this indicates that his affirmation of hierarchy is itself provisional, subject to apophatic critique.
Dionysius writes that “scripture and hierarchical tradition” are the best way we have to understand the divine, but they are nevertheless “veils” that “cover intelligible things with perceptible things.” Because God cannot be captured in thought or experience, Christian thought and practice are necessarily contingent. In my reading, this is why Dionysius frequently speaks “as best I can,” leaving it to the reader to form judgments of their own.
I have no desire to rehabilitate the content of Dionysius’s political thought, but I think this structure is instructive. Although the Dionysian corpus describes hierarchies that are elitist and rigid (considered in terms of their content), Dionysius affirms these structures in a manner that is explicitly flexible (with respect to its form). Although Dionysius did not affirm a democratic political system, the Dionysian corpus exemplifies the fluidity of democratic politics.
After all, no democracy is free of hierarchical order. We face persistent inequality associated with race, gender, and social class—even when people pretend such hierarchies have disappeared. Apart from these failures, even the most egalitarian political system will include asymmetries of various kind. (This is simply what it means to have a system.) The democratic task is to affirm a particular order—the best we can envision—while keeping it open to revision. Dionysius models precisely this practice, holding the tension between particular aims and unforeseen possibilities.
Hierarchy, Critique, and the Religion/Secular Divide
Like Braunstein, Andrew Prevot worries that I minimize the differences between Dionysius and Derrida. In my view, I think Derrida and Dionysius affirm the same kind of hope even though they hope for different things. However, Prevot suggests that this distinction between the content and kind of hope is unsustainable. For this reason, Prevot concludes that my way of thinking is “more indeterminate, more Derridean, and more secular” than his own.
Prevot implies that I attenuate Dionysius’s hierarchical commitments by reading the Dionysian corpus through a Derridean lens. He writes, “Without assistance from a source such as Derrida, Dionysius appears perfectly willing to blunt the disruptive force of his mysticism by assigning it a fixed place in his hierarchy, namely as the privileged knowledge of bishops and monks alone, a secret of the elite.” In the book, I argue at length that this reading of Dionysius is wrong. As I described in response to Braunstein, I think the textual evidence is clear: Dionysius does not exempt hierarchy from apophatic critique. In my reading, rather than subordinating mystical silence to hierarchical authority, Dionysius affirms ecclesial hierarchy in a provisional mode.
Since Derrida explicitly distances himself from the Dionysian hierarchies, it is striking that his politics has the same form. Because Derrida’s style is self-consciously elusive, many readers assume that he forswears determinate commitments. (After all, Derrida argues that concepts such as différance, justice, and democracy cannot be identified with any existing state of affairs.) However, Derrida insists that his own account of these concepts remains determinate, however elusive they may seem. Like Dionysius, he affirms particular commitments in a provisional mode.
In my reading, both authors affirm determinate commitments while holding open the possibility of revision through a disciplined negativity. Although they hope for different things, the manner in which they hope is therefore the same. In my view, this affinity is significant because Dionysius and Derrida differ in so many ways. Rather than denying their differences, this distance is the premise of my argument: it shows that the division between religion and the secular is not as clean as many assume.
I think something similar is true of Prevot’s work and my own. There is a sense in which my work is more secular than his, as Prevot suggests, but there is another sense in which it is not. Unlike Prevot, my book does not affirm specifically Christian hopes. However, it does not exclude them either. I leave it to my readers to decide what to hope for, and I encourage them to read Prevot’s work for guidance. For my part, I have sought to show what the discipline of hope is like (wherever it is found): against indeterminacy and dogma, an affirmation that flows.
Self-Critique and Hope
Like Prevot, Carolyn Chau wants more positivity than I provide. In her view, negative theology forecloses intimacy with God by demanding uncertainty. It is true that my argument focuses on Jacques Derrida and Dionysius the Areopagite, two authors who are famously critical. It is also true that, in contrast to some interpreters, I think their negativity functions as an ethical discipline. At the same time, one of my central claims is that a disciplined negativity enables resilient affirmation.
Consider the centrifugal energy of the Dionysian corpus. According to Dionysius, because the creator transcends creation, every name for God is subject to unsaying (in Greek: apophasis). At the same time, since God is the source of everything that exists, God must be called by every name—not only the nice ones. This practice of affirmation (in Greek: cataphasis) is so radical as to boggle the mind, requiring a welter of creativity that cannot be organized into a conceptual system. Rather than enforcing an absolute silence, Dionysian negativity is expansive.
In my reading, Dionysius and Derrida insist upon self-critique in order to resist premature closure. For both of them, negativity enables an affirmation that acknowledges its uncertainty. Rather than foreclosing other possibilities, this discipline encourages affirmation to proliferate in a provisional mode. For this reason, I see hope as central to their work (even though the theme is rarely explicit). For both authors critique cannot serve as our sole focus, for it opens onto the future.
Of course, what I call “critique” may take many forms. For Dionysius, it consists in affirming and denying every name for God. For Derrida, it is an interpretive practice that attends to the unpredictable play of meaning. In both cases, their negativity functions as a reminder that the world is wider than what one already knows. However, just as hope is sustained by a diverse set of practices, this negativity is not identified with a single tradition.
Rather than weakening religious commitment, I think critique of this kind makes faith more resilient. From Paul the Apostle to John of the Cross, many Christians have described prayer as an experience that is inflected by loneliness and doubt. In response, some claim that they possess a certainty grounded in the promises of God, but this triumphalism is brittle, prone to suddenly shatter. A similar pattern is evident in political commitment, which is prone to oscillate between complacency and despair. Since commitment of any kind is a risk, it must be sustained by a hope that persists without guarantees. In my view, Dionysius and Derrida show that a self-critical hope enables affirmation without assurance.
Theories and Practices of Hope
Atalia Omer describes a compelling vision of hope, informed by her field work in Kenya and the Philippines. Although my work operates in a different register, I think Omer’s work is important. For that reason, I found it surprising that Omer presents her essay as a rebuttal to my book. Because Omer provides minimal exposition of my argument, grounded upon limited textual evidence, I can’t tell what she thinks I am saying, and I do not know why she thinks we disagree. For my part, although our methods differ, I think our concerns are complementary.
Throughout her response, Omer suggests that my (theoretical) account of hope is elitist and abstract, whereas her understanding of hope is warranted by empirical reality. Along these lines, she writes that “empirically, therefore,…hope against despair means survival within rather than transcendence of the institutions and power structures shaping their predicaments of insecurity.” The difficulty is that this is not an empirical claim: insofar as Omer is speaking about what hope means, she is offering an interpretation rather than presenting pure facts. Because this assertion cannot be verified by observation alone, her work is no less theoretical than my own.
To take another example, Omer writes that “in my recent empirical research, I found that hope, as defined by the ability to imagine survival and to avoid fatalism and despair, depends often on hermeneutically closed (and thus conservative) accounts of religious traditions.” In this passage Omer claims that her research shows that hope often depends upon religious conservatism. However, this conclusion depends upon a theoretical judgment about what hope is: “hope, as defined by…” Because empirical research does not supply the definition on which Omer relies, she is engaged (once again) in the work of theory.
I do not think it is elitist to critically engage influential books. As I suggested in response to Andrew Prevot, the prevailing interpretation of Dionysius and Derrida has encouraged many readers to exaggerate the distance between religion and the secular. As I describe in response to Joseph Winters (below), these texts clarify the hope that sustains social movements such as Occupy and BLM. In response to Ted Vial I explained that this theoretical work helped me to understand my experience of solidarity and despair as I recovered from a traumatic brain injury. In my experience, theory is informed by the wider world, and it shapes material practice in turn.
To be clear, I think Dionysian apophasis and Derridean déconstruction illuminate the discipline of hope, but that does not mean hope is only available to those who endure their rebarbative prose. My book draws on these resources to describe a practice that is found whenever someone holds a desire that is vulnerable to disappointment—which is to say, wherever there is commitment of any kind. Since hope is a many-splendored thing, theory isn’t the only thing that matters, but I think it is indispensable if we are to understand our world and work to improve it.
Hope and Radical Change
With extraordinary care, Joseph Winters traces the tension I see as central to hope— between affirmation and critique, silence and speech, hierarchy and humility. However, where I argue that hope holds together openness and commitment, Winters wonders whether these two poles are at odds. As a hypothesis for discussion, he suggests that desire for a particular aim may foreclose the possibility of radical change.
Winters worries that a hope of this kind might be pacifying, but I think it is politically indispensable. Where the first part of my book argues that hope is a discipline of persistence, the final two chapters develop a negative political theology. As I understand it, negative political theology refuses theocracy without abandoning constructive political projects. Just as Derrida and Dionysius hold affirmation and negation in tension, a politics of this kind exercises power in a provisional mode.
In my view, this provides a theoretical framework for understanding contemporary politics. Amna Akbar argues that social movements hold together three distinct dimensions: critique, horizon, and praxis. On this reading, although Occupy (for instance) did less than BLM to pursue a constructive policy program, both movements incorporate critique of the prevailing order, concrete political goals, and praxis by which they pursue those aims. Some theorists suggest that these three dimensions are incompatible, but a negative political theology shows that construction and critique are complementary.
Much as personal openness is cultivated through particular practices, political activism is driven by determinate investments. As Akbar suggests, even the most thorough critique of the prevailing order is premised upon attachment to a potential future. For this reason, it would be unrealistic to relinquish every determinate aim. A sustainable politics must navigate between determinacy and indetermination.
Hope is the discipline which enables us to inhabit this tension. Winters wonders whether “giving up on certain prospects and objects of desire is precisely what is necessary to refuse the violent order of things.” I agree that certain things should be refused. However, if refusal is directed at a certain objects—rather than everything all at once—it’s impossible to live as if “all we have left is apostasy.” Instead, in each moment we must decide what to refuse and what to retain. Through hope, we can make judgments of this kind without falling into complacency or despair.
Winters asks, “Are there other dispositions that better register the negative, human anguish, and the potential for rupture?” My instinct on this point, as on others, is pluralist: to reckon with the full range of human experience, we need to speak not only of hope but also mourning, melancholy, grief, delight, amazement, and a great deal more. Winters has explored these themes with profound insight in his own book, Hope Draped in Black. For my part, I remain committed to hope because it incorporates negativity and affirmation, disappointment and desire, pessimism and persistence. Rather than foreclosing the possibility of rupture, persistent desire sustains creativity and resistance.
