The alternative to secular optimism in progress is hope. Real hope, as Lasch defines it, “does not demand a belief in progress” at all. “The disposition properly described as hope, trust, or wonder . . . three names for the same state of heart and mind—asserts the goodness of life in the face of its limits. It cannot be defeated by adversity.”19 Wh

So to have meaning in life is to have both an overall purpose for living and the assurance that you are making a difference by serving some good beyond yourself. The psychological need for this is inarguable.

Haidt says that the answer—of the Buddha and Chinese sages like Lao Tzu in the East and the Greek Stoic philosophers in the West—constituted the “early happiness hypothesis” of ancient times. The principle was this: We are unhappy even in success because we seek happiness from success. Wealth, power, achievement, family, material comfort, and secur

If Jesus Christ was really raised from the dead—if he is really the Son of God and you believe in him—all these things that you long for most desperately will come true at last. We will escape time and death. We will know love without parting, we will even communicate with nonhuman beings (think angels), and we will see evil defeated forever. In fa

Social capital lowers the cost of economic transactions and fosters social ties that lower crime rates, homelessness, and school dropout rates. Government policy and programs cannot create social capital.

When people have religion imposed on them through social pressure instead of choosing it freely, they often embrace it in a halfhearted or even hypocritical way. The best option is a government that promotes neither a single faith nor a doctrinaire form of secularist belief that denigrates and marginalizes religion.

We want to find meaning in things but the universe does not cooperate. We are all like Sisyphus in the Greek myth, rolling the rock up the hill only to see it inevitably roll back. We try to do good for the people we love, but what we do never lasts, nor do they. To Camus, death is not a gateway into another life but a “closed door.”

The happier we are, the happier we will make each other. And that means that in heaven our joy and glory will multiply exponentially forever, “with inconceivable ardor of heart.”61

As one writer puts it, “The fact of death is the great human repression, the universal ‘complex.’ . . . Death is muffled up in illusions.”38 To insist that death is nothing to be frightened of is simply another illusion muffling the obscenity of death. We live in denial of it, but like all repressed facts, it keeps disturbing us, haunting us, and q