How should hope shape Christian citizens' public engagement? Today hope has become just one more empty word in public life. Keep hope alive! Hope is on the way! Believe in a little town called Hope. These are not even clichés any more; they are simulacra of clichés, too aware of their own cheesiness to pretend to anyone that they could be believed. Today, hope has succumbed to cynicism. But not long ago, hope motivated public action in real and powerful ways. In America it was essential in the civil rights movement; in Central and Eastern Europe it motivated, in part, the campaigns against the Soviet bloc in the 1980s. What happened? Can we be hopeful today?

This is not in fact a merely pragmatic question; it is properly theological. For hope is always needed and always something we do not properly possess. It is a divine dynamic in which we may, through grace, participate, but which we try perpetually, in sin, to control. Our need, and our lack, are especially visible in public life, where our need of hope is accentuated because of the many frustrations that lurk therein.