Hope, interreligious democracy, good ancestors, and gossamer threads

In this response to the 46th Annual Distinguished Faculty Lecture by Valerie Miles‐Tribble at the Graduate Theological Union, I reflect on four questions: (1) What practices can help us cultivate and restore hope when our hope inevitably wanes? (2) How do we vigorously, even relentlessly expose injustices (and our complicities with them) even while we seek to fire the creative energies we need to come up with solutions? (3) How can we, imperfect as we are, be good ancestors or—as the indigenous environmental justice activist Winona LaDuke phrases it: “Be the ancestor our descendants would be proud of?” (4) Where are we threadbare, and what is the thread like that each of us is contributing to the tapestry

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