Although thinkers like Miguel de la Torre have argued that a Christian response to the injustices of a world in crisis is to embrace hopelessness, the lecture will offer an account of hope as a gift and a discipline that is theologically demanded and politically responsible. All authentic hope, as Aquinas understands it, has a proximity to what many contemporary philosophers have called ‘radical hope’: an orientation towards a future in which the conditions for thriving are so radically re-configured as to transcend the capacities of the present moment to articulate and predict. This leads to a suggested addition to Aquinas’s account, in which hope not only depends upon faith but actually makes certain types of knowing and acting possible.

Our thanks to the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology, Cambridge, for the Zoom hosting.