“Hope,” David Newheiser writes in Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith, “is decision added to desire, and as such it is unconstrained by calculation” (9). This is good news, since hope can coexist alongside the pessimism and uncertainty that circulate widely today, unmitigated as they are by systems of persistent calculation. The book explores hope as an intellectual project and as a practice of enacting a decision to go on desiring, matters that convene this symposium. The conversation below covers rich territory surveyed by Newheiser’s intervention, from its animating exchange between Pseudo-Dionysius and Jacques Derrida on the question of hope despite—or because of—instability, to reflections on democratic politics and its material contradictions, and an inquiry into various traditions of conviction, perceiving surprising affinities to forge a basis for solidarities and new hopes.
Hope in a Secular Age makes particular claims about reading. Like Dionysius and Derrida, Newheiser believes that “people think by reading” (11). Because of the deep mutual implication of present and future, self and other, knowledge and mystery, a “revolution in thought does not require pure novelty; instead, we can uncover unexpected possibilities in familiar traditions” (11). These claims bear an analogy to Newheiser’s insistence, here and elsewhere, that fidelity to the spirit of a tradition requires navigating between rejection and repetition with a painstaking invention that carries it forward (12).
Beyond simply making such striking claims, the book, more significantly, performs their implications. Hope in a Secular Age, like its theoretical inspirations, reads beyond and across discipline and identity. Through sensitive readings of various figures, it finds a constructive vision of hope in contemporary life that presumes neither the purported social certainties of the postwar era nor the pure, hermetically sealed traditions of confessional identity. Newheiser thus encourages us, in hope, not to turn away from but rather to face the dislocations—easily recalled by recent memory and conjured by current anxiety in 2026—that call into question who we thought we were and what we thought our lives might be. In that project, a faith is possible that can “draw power from the sacred without allowing it to harden into myopia,” insisting on changes in social arrangements that draw us closer to a justice to come (151).
The symposium respondents raise a number of considerations, both in affirmation and critique, to press Newheiser, and the rest of us, to grapple with the promises and limits of hope. For Ted Vial, Newheiser’s analysis of Pseudo-Dionysius and Derrida reveals dynamics and postures essential for navigating the complexities of modern politics. These include resistance to a sharp binary between religion and secularism and a refusal to choose between negation and affirmation. In examining Newheiser’s assertion that hope is rooted in the will and requires discipline, Vial explores the role of spiritual exercises and practices in cultivating hope even when grounds for it elude us. Vial also implies a suggestive link between pedagogy and the practices of hope. He proposes that reading, particularly the type of “reparative reading” carried out by Newheiser, can serve as a disciplinary practice for sustaining hope, while pressing Newheiser to make more concrete how hope as a discipline might be enacted.
Eva Braunstein questions whether Newheiser adequately addresses the hierarchical and potentially anti-democratic elements of Dionysian thought. While acknowledging Newheiser’s argument that the unknowability of God relativizes hierarchical arrangements in Dionysius, she argues that such divinely ordained hierarchy clashes with the contingent nature of modern democratic institutions. Such hierarchical structure, furthermore, coupled with the Dionysian valorization of secrecy, raises concerns about its compatibility with modern democratic values of transparency and equality. Braunstein also raises questions about Newheiser’s interpretive method and the broader challenge of retrieving insights from historically distant texts for contemporary concerns.
Carolyn Chau challenges Newheiser’s focus on self-critique as the primary means of cultivating a chastened hope and argues against Newheiser’s framing of hope as solely a discipline of enduring incompletion. She emphasizes the transformative power of prayer and the role of personal encounter with the divine. Chau contrasts this approach with a purely negative theology, suggesting that engaging in constant self-critique might actually inhibit the kind of risk and vulnerability necessary for authentic faith. Completing the tripartite Pauline virtues, she contends that engagement with faith and love, grounded in the recognition of divine presence and power, is essential for hope’s transformative potential.
Andrew Prevot examines Newheiser’s comparison between Dionysius and Derrida, grounded as it is in a “kind/content distinction.” Prevot inquires about the implicit criteria for determining which pieces of “content” function to specify “kind” and which do not, criteria which Newheiser may depend on to adjudicate interpretive debates about both of the book’s figures. Acknowledging a constructive, in-between hope as a meaningful model for a secular age, Prevot nonetheless presses what can be said with non-dogmatic conviction speaking from some of that “content,” namely given but “never fully comprehended” Christian doctrines. These teachings can be meaningfully distinguished from the attempt to domesticate the essence of God, and Prevot makes a plea on behalf of the democratic fruitfulness of allowing differences in such content to nourish distinct hopes without neat synthesis.
Joseph Winters highlights the complex and ambivalent nature of hope, acknowledging its importance for human persistence while recognizing its potential to perpetuate harmful conditions. He highlights how Newheiser reconciles Derrida’s insistence on the “impossibility” of justice, that justice is “always to come,” with the necessity of engaging in calculation and judgments in the present. Evaluating Newheiser’s conception of hope as a form of perseverance that allows for transformation and surprise, Winters raises critical questions about the relationship between persistent engagement for change, on one hand, to matters of rupture, refusal, and abolition, on the other. In light of justified grounds for pessimism, what are the potential limitations of hope for addressing injustice? What does it mean to hope for a future when none can be imagined in light of the present system?
Atalia Omer perceives a tension between Newheiser’s desire to speak to conditions of material immiseration and insecurity, on the one hand, and his centering of an individual, mystical embrace of risk and uncertainty, on the other, questioning whether the latter advances an ethical posture unsuited to address the former. Drawing on her research in the Philippines and Kenya, Omer argues that, contrary to Newheiser’s reliance on the insecurity written into human being considered in abstraction, the empirical hopes of the people meant to be helped by the book are expressed in aspirations “for certainty and future predictability” that are better approximated in the lives of people who populate Anglophone seminar rooms. Such determinate hope, embodied, for instance, by people working for interreligious peace in Mindanao, expresses a “Sisyphean” attempt to transform conditions “for the persistence of suffering,” maintained in part through an “everyday struggle against despair.”
These interventions and Newheiser’s responses invite us to consider whether and how hope as a discipline and practice can navigate the fractures of our present, fostering resilience while daring to reimagine the future. The exchange opens horizons for further inquiry: the interplay among hope, praxis, and refusal in contexts of systemic injustice; the transformative power of communal practices even when or precisely because religious “belief” is placed under erasure; the legitimacy of hope in contexts of radical precarity; and the capacity of hope to negotiate seemingly incommensurable traditions, perspectives, and social locations. As Newheiser suggests, hope thrives not in certainty but in the creative tension of becoming—a disciplined assertion that even amidst dislocation, the potential for renewal persists. The labor of hope lies in continuing to uncover these possibilities, often in the darkness, inviting us to embrace the risk of transformation for a justice that remains to come.
