The Audacity of Hope

The Audacity of Hope
Genesis 5: 21-32

At a lunch the weekend after Tony Blair became British prime minister in 1997, I was talking with a woman at our table. The event had reminded me of the election of Harold Wilson’s government in Britain in 1964, and I had been thinking of the way euphoria turned to disillusion over the years that followed. When I voiced a concern that the same scenario would unfold (as it subsequently did), this woman became quite angry. I had destroyed the hope that the election brought to her. When Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, it was explicitly on a “hope” ticket, in a context when the United States needed some hope. The trouble is that whether it is Wilson, Blair, or Obama, he gets turned into a messiah. The danger is then that “the audacity of hope” (the title Obama gave to one of his books) becomes the deceptiveness of hope...