The conclusion shows that the righteousness of faith is polyvalent: if faith is motivated by fear, as in Donatists and lax catechumens, it fails to justify; if faith is motivated by hope in Christ, as in converting catechumens, it justifies because it will obtain the grace of the Holy Spirit; if faith is motivated by love of Christ, as in the faithful, it justifies as the essential superstructure of righteousness in Christ. In every case, faith justifies as the crucible in which God transforms desire. As final examples, the conclusion considers the catechumen as an image of the process of justification and the baptized as an image of the state of justification, though it is a state characterized both by righteousness in Christ and by hope in future grace. Ultimately, faith is a proper theological mystery for Augustine because faith’s righteousness comes from its being saturated with Christ and the Holy Spirit.

While many scholars have argued that Augustine’s theology of grace underwent a shift around 418, making the grace of faith more inward, Chapter 5 proposes that instead, Augustine’s vocabulary of faith simply expands to encompass hopeful and loving faith, which are due to inward graces. Augustine’s expanded vocabulary can be seen especially through his distinction between three different senses of credere (believing). Credere Christum – believing truths about Christ – is necessary for true virtue, since faith orders actions to their ultimate end, but is not sufficient for it. Credere Christo – believing Christ – justifies when motivated by hope. Hope is both the desire for the grace to love and the first beginning of love by grace. Hope therefore explains many puzzles in Augustine’s mature theology of grace. Lastly, credere in Christum – believing in Christ – is a synecdoche for faith, hope, and love. It signifies not merely the means to righteousness but participation in Christ and the very essence of human righteousness.

Despite the colossal importance of Augustine in the history of justification, no comprehensive study on this topic has yet been written. Moreover, the prevailing view is that Augustine understood justification to be caused by charity, not faith. This book aims to re-center Augustine’s theology of justification onto faith, and its thesis is that Augustine developed multiple accounts of how faith justifies based on whether faith is motivated by fear (which fails to justify), hope (which will justify), or love (which already justifies). The introduction then establishes the fundamentals of justification for Augustine: Augustine understands justification to consist in forgiveness and interior renewal, interprets iustificare (to justify) as making righteous by grace alone, and understands human iustitia (righteousness) as a created gift distinct from God’s righteousness. Lastly, the introduction shows how justification was central to Augustine, both to counter Pelagianism and to explain the work of God operative in the actions of the Church.

Chapter 3 begins with how the Donatist controversy shaped Augustine’s theology of justification by faith because the Donatists represented the real possibility of having faith without charity. The chapter then turns to the key features of Augustine’s theology of justification formed by the Pelagian controversy, especially participation in Christ’s righteousness. Both controversies pressed Augustine to consider how justification is by faith if faith sometimes fails to justify, as in Donatists, lax catechumens, and impenitent Christians. In both de spiritu et littera (The Spirit and the Letter) and his sermons, Augustine addresses this through a deeper psychology of faith: faith only obtains the grace of justification when it is motivated by hope and fails if it is motivated primarily by fear. The chapter concludes with de fide et operibus (Faith and Works), exploring Augustine’s understanding of faith, works, and charity, his criticism of sola fide (faith alone), and his development of a new terminology for justifying faith: fides Christi (faith in Christ).

Early in the text of Works of Love (1847) Kierkegaard makes the claim that “Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally and happily secured against despair.” The purpose of this chapter is to interrogate how this claim might relate to his later claim in The Sickness unto Death (1849) that it is faith that is the opposite of despair. The first section introduces the intertwined dynamics of love and despair as they are traced out by Kierkegaard in both Works of Love and The Sickness unto Death. The second section of this chapter argues that there is a genuine therapy that the loving person undergoes and is able through love of others to heal the sickness unto death that is nothing other than despair. The third and final section of this chapter considers the basis on which we might attribute to Kierkegaard a view of the theological virtues at least as being closely related by dint of a common structure and a common aspiration to consolation and integration of the self with itself in peace and reconciliation despite the unavoidable sorrows of our lives.

This manifesto argues that by combining student voice, agency and practical wisdom, or phronēsis, a more equitable and just educational system can be created that supports students’ empowerment as leaders of transformative change who can make well-informed, values-based judgements. Practical wisdom is the ability to make well-informed decisions based on knowledge, experience and ethical values. The manifesto recommends specific actions in support of this, such as reevaluating curriculum goals; availing students of different types of knowledge, capacities and reasoning; and establishing environments that promote collaboration and reflection. It aims to inspire educators to nurture children to be better decision makers and collaborative problem solvers. It concludes that despite the challenges facing the world today, the voices of children and young people offer hope, and that we must listen to them.

This chapter reflects on a case involving a pediatric patient with a rare neurogenerative disease whose medical team requested an ethics consultation when his parents disagreed with the medical recommendation to remove his breathing tube, knowing that this could lead to his death. The ethics consultation explored what at first appeared to be conflicting beliefs about the facts of this patient’s condition and quality of life: his medical team believed he had an irreversible, neurodegenerative condition that would become progressively more debilitating and uncomfortable; his parents believed that he may still recover from his disease and survive. Yet on deeper analysis, we came to see that this was not a case of a medical team holding true beliefs and a family holding false beliefs about the clinical facts of the matter, but rather a difference between ways of being in and seeing the world, particularly as it relates to reasoning from a position of faith in what might be. This case shows the importance of differentiating between claims about facts and assertions of values, and how biomedical expectations of evidence can influence perceptions of relevant information during a clinical ethics consultation.

The Introduction sets the scene for the book’s chapters and analysis. On the northern periphery of Nairobi, in southern Kiambu County, the city’s expansion into a landscape of poor smallholders is bringing new opportunities, dilemmas, and conflicts. Profoundly shaped by Kenya’s colonial history, Kiambu’s ‘workers with patches of land’ struggle to sustain their households while the skyrocketing price of land ratchets up gendered and generational tensions over their meagre plots, with consequences for class futures. Land sale by senior men turns would-be inheritors, their young adult sons, into landless and land-poor paupers, heightening their exposure to economic precarity. The Introduction sets out how these dynamics are lived at the site of kinship, and how moral principles of patrilineal obligation and land retention fail in the face of market opportunity. Within this context, the Introduction sets out the book’s exploration of how Kiambu’s young men struggle to sustain hopes for middle-class lifestyles as the economic ground shifts beneath their feet.

Chapter 2 turns towards the neighbourhood of Ituura. It introduces my field site in detail by exploring cases of local youth who are said to have been ‘wasted’ by alcoholism. In contrast to those who are said to have ‘given up’ on their futures, other young men are shown to embrace discourses of moral fortitude to sustain their hopes for the future while working for low, piecemeal wages in the informal economy. Such youth claim that one must be ‘bold to make it’. Engaging with anthropological discussion on waithood and hope, the chapter shows how young men cultivate moral fortitude through an ethics of endurance – a hope for hope itself, a way of sustaining belief in their own long-term futures that involves economising practices, prayer, and avoidance of one’s peers who are seen to be a source of temptation and pressure to consume.

In this chapter, we consider hope as the supremely political virtue, which is to say one that helps us to venture great things in the business of building a shared life. We also consider questions of scale, and the idea that we should be happy to ‘start small’ and attend, first of all, and even mainly, to the challenges and opportunities that lie closest to hand, in our homes, localities and places of work.

This chapter examines early scholastic discussions of the ontology of grace and how grace is related to the theological virtues and other spiritual gifts conferred on the soul.

In this chapter, I argue that Plato’s depiction of the last day of Socrates in the Phaedo is not only a tragedy in Plato’s ideal sense, but it also repeatedly contrasts its own presentation of the death of Socrates with how a traditional tragedy might portray it. This contrast brings into stark relief the intellectual, moral and emotional gap between ideal and actual tragedy, in addition to an important disagreement about the nature and goodness of death. For actual tragedy, death is the worst thing that can happen. In the Phaedo, death is presented as a kind of liberation from the body, but this conception of death reveals the insurmountable limitations on the attainment of knowledge that living embodiment entails. The problem is not with argument itself, but with our all-too-human grasp of it. This means that, because of our embodied finitude, we can never actually be certain that the arguments for Socrates’ optimistic picture of divine redemption really are sound. My interpretation highlights Socrates’ epistemic uncertainty and the role of hope, and it makes misology passage more central to the dialogue’s argument than usually recognized. In the end, I assess the dialogue in light of the constraints on ideal tragedy articulated in Chapter 4.

Chapter 11 revisits the key themes of this book’s chapters in light of questions about what should and could be done to make land use in the United States racially just. Even though the book begins with the intransigence of deeply embedded racial inequities in American land use, this last chapter turns to themes of hope and potential for a racial-justice transformation. First, the history of grassroots anti-racism activism is instructive for how the next generations of activists can work effectively for transformative change in the land use systems. Second, a substantive anti-subordination theory of the law can make a difference if it influences not only legal doctrines adopted by the courts but also the restructuring of land-use institutions, including private-market systems. Third, public policy reforms must be multi-faceted and aimed at systemic change, supported by evidence and advocacy. The chapter concludes with hopeful thoughts about how a Third Reconstruction could change the trajectory of “the monstrous and evil story” of “racism, power, wealth, and land throughout the nation’s history.”

This chapter brings into conversation two powerful, imbricated forces in contemporary Nigeria: the dramatic rise in fundamentalist religious Christian and Islamic formations that place hope and prosperity in the afterlife, and the proliferation of community-based technology projects that offer ordinary victims and survivors the power of data as a way to make sense of past and future violence. The chapter argues that these trends are imbricated both with one another and with the history of colonialism from earlier periods to the contemporary moment. The chapter raises questions about the extent to which this Nigerian case study foreshadows a more global shift away from long established (western) authorities – in particular, the law and the nation-state – and toward futures where more and more people could turn toward a kind of moral and political vigilantism, taking the tools for creating hope and meaning (back) into their own hands.

In his chapter, Gregory Castle explores the cultural need for heroism expressed by W. B. Yeats and Alice Milligan at a time (the first decade of the twentieth century) when hope for the future was an explicit component of revivalist discourse across the arts and the political spectrum. Yeats’s In the Seven Woods (1903) offers a vision of legendary and contemporary heroism in which love and desire are transformed in a process in which the experience of beauty and its loss, as well as the representation of this experience, become heroic endeavors. In Milligan’s Hero Lays (1908), heroism does not rely on a transposition of love into the context of heroism. Rather, her vision is informed by political activism; her poems mine the ancient legends for a model of heroic action that would be suitable for the nationalist cause of her own time. For both poets, the heroic ethos of the legendary past is sustained as part of the contemporary poet’s bardic responsibility.

Offering a message of hope and resilience, reflections from climate advocates emphasise the possibility of limiting global warming and mitigating its impacts. Renato Redentor Constantino, senior advisor to the CVF-V20, calls for innovative financial solutions and increased international cooperation to support vulnerable economies. Indigenous voices, such as Victor Yalanda from Colombia, stress the importance of preserving traditional knowledge and protecting natural resources. Nakeeyat Dramani Sam from Ghana underscores the urgency of immediate action to safeguard the future for young people. The chapter calls on governments, businesses, and individuals to take decisive action now. The critical role of international agreements like the Paris Agreement is underlined. A powerful call to action urges all stakeholders to seize the remaining opportunities to protect the planet and ensure a sustainable future. United efforts can still create a world where people and the planet thrive amidst climate challenges – if we act fast.