Hope Does Not Exist": O'neil Van Horn on Making Hope and the Practice of Resurrection

My friend & Orbis editor, Dr. Tom Hermans-Webster, sent me this book with a note that said, "You're going to love this, Tripp. No, really, you are." He was right. O'neil Van Horn's Making Hope: Practices, Prayers, and Parables for a Changing Climate opens on page one by announcing that hope does not exist — which sounds like a branding failure until you realize he means hope is not a feeling or a thing or an object you possess, but an activity. Verbal. Processual. Something we weave together. The book is built in three movements — noticing, gathering, repairing — with nine everyday practices treated as parables: birding, foraging, composting, seed saving, mending, baking bread. It is process theology written for people who do not want to hear the word concrescence ever again, and it does the rare thing of being genuinely usable by a reading group, a Sunday school class, or a preacher looking for a sermon series. We covered why optimism and pessimism are both forms of certainty and hope is neither, why his farmer friend asking who is that? about a birdsong was a revelation, why compost undermines the entire Western notion of essence, why the shame you feel about not knowing your local trees is not your fault, and what it means that the book ends not with a trumpet but with a loaf of bread. My chicken Raven made a cameo. She said it was her favorite.

Van Horn is offering to Zoom in with any reading group, discussion group, or congregation working through Making Hope. Reach him through the contact form at ⁠oneilvanhorn.com⁠.

You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube

⁠About our guest

Dr. O'neil Van Horn is Assistant Professor of Theology at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He holds a PhD in philosophical and theological studies in religion from Drew University (where he studied with Catherine Keller), was a Louisville Institute Scholar from 2021 to 2023, and comes to theology with a background in organic agriculture and sustainability.

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