It is often easy to determine whether an edited volume is comprised of essays by scholars in sustained conversation with one another or is instead one in which the editors simply collect essays on a particular theme. This volume is clearly the culmination of a collective endeavor by Catholic scholars from various disciplines; the essays bear the imprint of sustained interactions around the vital topic of hope—what it is, and how it is nurtured, sustained, and lived out.

Drawing on resources both within and outside Catholicism, these writers examine the challenge and possibility of hope in a contemporary global context. Part 1, “Grounding Hope,” sets the tone by offering helpful exegetical background on biblical—especially Pauline—understandings of hope as well as examining hope as a theological virtue, with some help from Aquinas.

Part 2, “Nurturing Hope,” features more contextual analyses of how and where hope is cultivated. It begins with a lovely exegetical piece entitled “The Fragility of Hope in Luke-Acts,” wherein Christopher Matthews demonstrates how the hope set forward by Luke is hope that includes the redemption of Israel. Thomas Groome's essay, “Is There Hope for Faith?,” creatively makes connections between the pedagogy of Jesus and a Freirean model of education, a model Groome has taught for decades with great success. In the final essay in this section, Hosffman Ospino offers a fascinating examination of hope as constant companion of migrants who journey to the United States from Central America. Ospino shows how hope guides the preparations of migrants, accompanies them on their journey, and sustains many upon their arrival in their new land.

Part 3, “Sustaining Hope,” includes John Baldovin's insightful essay, “Pignus, Futurae, Gloriae: Liturgy, Eschatology, and Hope,” which demonstrates how the future is realized ritualistically, especially through the anointing of the sick and in funeral liturgies, and how the hope expressed is not only for the dying and the dead but also for those who care for them. Andrea Vicini's “Hope Springs: Shaping a Moral Life” draws on the words and actions of Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. In Maathai, Vicini finds a hopeful vision for an ecologically sustainable future, and uses that vision to reaffirm Pope John Paul II's claim that there is an “urgent moral need for a new solidarity.”

Part 4, “Living Hope,” continues the theme of widening the scope of hope's reach toward a sustainable future not just for human beings but for all of creation. John Sachs' essay, “Hope for Creation,” proposes engagement in Ignatian-style contemplative prayer that cultivates imaginative engagement with Jesus' acts in the Gospels, especially those that help clarify the values of God's reign, values that include creation in its most cosmic scope. The volume concludes with Francine Cardman's “History and Hope,” an essay that proposes “re-appropriating and refining” Gaudium et Spes for today, especially in light of the hopeful activities of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious in 2012.

This text is strongest where it offers specific illustrations about what hope means and how it is nurtured, sustained, and practiced in human lives as well as in Scripture and tradition. While most essays offer concrete illustrations of their theories about hope, a few remain at the theoretical level, which can lead to a conceptually tidy viewpoint that does not necessarily hold up when applied to concrete experiences of awfulness that threaten the existence of hope. In part 1, “Grounding Hope,” to cite just one example, one author starkly contrasts hope and despair, calling despair a “deliberate choice” and a “sin” because it rejects the possibility of participation in divine life. Those who find despair a close companion at various points in long journeys with suffering might argue that to cast despair in such a tidily sinful manner belies a messier, more threatening reality. Most of the essays seem to affirm more complex sets of conditions facing the task of hope, and offer much insight and wisdom on how to embrace hope even when despair insists on remaining close by.