Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

This rebirth of faith and revival of happiness must be watched over carefully. We should recall every day how right Carlos Quijano was when he said that sins against hope are the only sins beyond forgiveness and redemption.

The future is dark, with a darkness as much of the womb as the grave.

traditional participatory cultures, which are equally important as sources and presences, and in which membership in the community counterbalances

How do you map the US Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling that struck down the last of the laws criminalizing gay and lesbian sex? The conventional narrative would have it that the power rests in the hands of the nine robed ones; a more radical model would mention the gay Texas couple who chose to turn their lives inside out over many years to press the la

was an attempt to live within the potential meanings, communities, limitations, and long-term prospects of a region, to live on local terms, eat local foods, to know exactly where you were and how to take care of it. It was about belonging to a place not as a birthright but as an act of conscious engagement.

What startled me about the response to disaster was not the virtue, since virtue is often the result of diligence and dutifulness, but the passionate joy that shined out from accounts by people who had barely survived. These people who had lost everything, who were living in rubble or ruins, had found agency, meaning, community, immediacy in their

We adjust to changes without measuring them; we forget how much the culture changed.

German philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote, “The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong.”

Another part of the Puritan legacy is the belief that no one should have joy or abundance until everyone does, a belief that’s austere at one end, in the deprivation it endorses, and fantastical in the other, since it awaits a universal utopia.

The status quo would like you to believe it is immutable, inevitable, and invulnerable, and lack of memory of a dynamically changing world reinforces this view.