Research has found that hope, or the wish for and confidence in the realization of a goal, is essential for achieving social change and peacebuilding efforts, and that futures thinking, or mentally planning out a desired world, is a key means to achieve these aims efficiently.
Pope Francis has called for the creation of a global education system with humanity, not God, at its center. He introduced his plan in a video released at the delayed “Global Compact on Education” event at the Pontifical Lateran University.
This Corona Connection, inspired by an article by Nancy Sylvester, invites reflections on two viruses: COVID-19 and racism. First, what can we learn from the compassion and tenacity of Dr. Anthony Fauci? Second, what can be learned from the painfully exposed virus of racism that has infected the moral integrity of our country since its origins?
With Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next.