Category: hope

Ask a room of Quakers what hope means to them and you’ll get a variety of answers. Ask these same Friends to describe the shared Quaker hope and it might take a while. You won’t find a section on hope in Quaker faith & practice. The most recent collective statement on hope made by Quakers in Britain, to my knowledge, is from 2009 in the context of climate change: ‘our faith in common humanity gives hope; love, rather than fear, can still lead us through this crisis.’[1] What does it mean to have faith in common humanity? Isn’t common humanity why we’re in this mess? Hope is something that Quakers today aren’t well practiced at talking about, even as situations like the climate crisis compel us to articulate what hope means.

Here’s the text of the paper I presented at the Society for the Study of Theology Postgraduate Conference, 4-6 September 2023, at the University of Edinburgh. In this paper, which is based on my Masters thesis, I begin with the understanding of hope found in narrative theology, a way of doing theology associated with Stanley Hauerwas among others. I use this to show how Quakers in Britain today struggle to articulate a common hope. I then suggest how Quaker worship can be seen as a source of transcendent hope through offering a taste of the Eternal sabbath, with some help from Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann.