Love's Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis

by Norman Wirzba

A moving exploration of the place of hope in the world today, drawing on agrarian principles
 
In this series of meditations, Norman Wirzba recasts hope not as something people have, like a vaccine to prevent pain and trouble, but as something people do. Hope evaporates in conditions of abandonment and abuse. It grows in contexts of nurture and belonging. Hope ignites when people join in what Wendell Berry calls “love’s braided dance”—a commitment to care for one another and our world.
 
Through personal narratives and historical examples, Wirzba explores what sustains hope and why it so often seems absent from our vision of the future. The vitality of hope, he maintains, depends on a collective commitment to care for the physical world (its soils and waters, plants and animals, homes and neighborhoods) and to promote the moral, aesthetic, and spiritual ideals that affirm life as good, beautiful, and sacred.
 
Engaging with such contemporary topics as climate change, AI and social media, and the intensifying refugee crises and drawing on the wisdom of James Baldwin, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Martha Graham, and others, Wirzba offers a powerful argument for hope as a way of life in which people are intimately and practically joined with all the living.

Genres: Faith, Theology, Religion

205 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 29, 2024

About the author

Norman Wirzba is Professor of Theology and Ecology at Duke University Divinity School and a pioneer of scholarly work on religion, philosophy, ecology, and agrarianism. He is also the author of Food and Faith, Living the Sabbath, The Paradise of God, and From Nature to Creation. He lives near Hillsborough, North Carolina.

Reviews

[Kristina Knight · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was fortunate to have Dr. Wirzba as a professor at Duke Divinity School. In class, I asked him the question: What gives you hope? He gave a wry smile and more or less deflected altogether. This book gave me my answer. Rather than seeing hope as an injection of optimistic feelings that dull our sense of the world’s pain, hope instead can be seen as the improvisational, creative, contextualized outworking of love. Instead of “looking” for hope, we engage in hope through attunement to our communities and the give-and-take dance of love. In a gloomy political atmosphere and in a world grappling with violence and climate disasters, this is a book that gave me courage.

[Annah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wirzba, an eco-theologian and brilliant thinker, examines the reciprocal dependency between "erotic hope" and mutual nurture: true hope ignites compassion between people, and compassion generates hope. Flush with anecdotes, easy to read, and abundant in faith. I wanted more theology, but that was an expectation management issue.

[Austin Spence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Instilling meaningful hope through stories of devastation and redemption.

One aspect of the book that really stood out was the voices that Wirzba pulled from. In a world full of overly-quoted thinkers/ authors/ etc., these were expansive and added to my Rolodex of co-thinkers.

[Michael W · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars if I could give it that rating. I felt like the author did an amazing job of detailing all the ways in which a society that places, productivity and capitalism at the center, produces trickle down effects that affect individuals ability to feel connected to the Earth, purpose, and make it difficult to cultivate a life of hope.
I also love the author’s idea of Hope as more of a verb than a noun, as a way of life more than something to be grasped, however, I felt like not as much attention was devoted to practical ways in which individuals and communities could cultivate this sense of hope . Overall, I felt I learned a lot about the ways in which our society is structured that make it difficult to cultivate. Hope, I just wish there was more practical takeaways for how to combat or rethink some of these macro issues in our day-to-day lives and practices.

[Elizabeth Payne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think my favorite part of this book was the wide variety of conversation partners Wirzba engages with—he helpfully enlists the stories, insights, and opinions of those who I expect don’t typically find themselves quoted in a theological book. At the same time, this whole book felt more like a collection of other people’s stories, insights, and opinions, and I wish there was more of Wirzba’s own voice. The synthesizing parts were the most engaging and helpful for me.

Wirzba poses and then begins to answer the question of how to be in a world that is both beautiful, wounded, and wounding. The answer centers around hope, “dance,” attention, love, forgiveness…

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. A stunning book. I didn’t agree with everything the author said, but his ability to use storytelling to frame his arguments is inspiring.

[Katie Rund · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book about what hope really is

[Maria Hrickova · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.7

[Traynor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good, but also a bit more of a snoozefest than I was expecting.