New Issue: Hope Itself

Announcing: Our new fall issue is now live on HedgehogReview.com! Look for an exciting slate of reviews and essays from familiar favorites and new authors such as Tara Isabella Burton, Alan Jacobs, Alexander Stern, Phoebe Maltz Bovy, Ian Marcus Corbin, Mary Harrington, David Stromberg, and many others.

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From the editor: In his 1959 sermon "Shattered Dreams," written three years after the successful Montgomery bus boycott as he anticipated even greater challenges ahead, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. reminded his congregation at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church that "very few, if any, of us are able to see all of our hopes fulfilled." Describing the allegorical painting Hope by the English Symbolist artist George Frederic Watts—reproduced on the cover of this issue—King noted that Watts "depicts Hope as seated atop our planet, but her head is sadly bowed and her fingers are plucking one unbroken harp string." Without having to spell out whose dreams he was referring to, King asked, "Who has not had to face the agony of blasted hopes and shattered dreams?"

Enigmatic as the allegorical image might seem, the simple fact that the blindfolded figure continues to pluck on the remaining string was clearly not lost on King. Indeed, it is central to the point his sermon builds to (in words hauntingly prefiguring those of his 1968 Memphis "I've Been to the Mountaintop" speech): "Of course some of us will die having not received the promise of freedom. But we must continue to move on. On the one hand we must accept the finite disappointment, but in spite of this we must maintain the infinite hope. This is the only way that we will be able to live without the fatigue of bitterness and the drain of resentment."

Infinite hope, hope against hope, is nothing less than what the great Christian thinker Søren Kierkegaard understood as authentic hope. By contrast with worldly hopes that focus on transitory goods such as success and happiness, authentic hope is nothing less than the will to live in faithful relation to the ideal of eternal and unchanging Good. To live without such hope, the Sage of Copenhagen held, is not only to live in despair but to abandon the task of becoming a self, a true individual.

Continue reading "From the Editor."

From the new issue: Our ability to imagine a future world, undertake common projects, and flourish in the meantime is dependent, in part, on whether we live in hope or despair. These different habits of seeing the world correspond to two ancient literary genres—comedy and tragedy. But the hopeful, comic outlook on life, argues scholar and writer Tara Isabella Burton in "On Hope and Holy Fools," is at a distinct disadvantage in our cultural moment. That's because, as Burton writes, "There is nothing very sexy about hope."

"Certainly, there is nothing sexy about grace. The idea that we might be redeemed by an act of love—a wordless affirmation of something beyond the paradigms through which we are capable of understanding ourselves—is, well, a little mawkish, a bit cringe. Hope has little aesthetic appeal. Hope is the awkward comic reversal, shoehorned in like the end of Gluck's opera Orfeo ed Euridice, which rewrites the Greek myth to have the doomed lovers be reunited by none other than the soprano-singing personification of love itself. Better at least, according to Ivan Karamazov, to look at the horrors of the world straight on, to stare the absent and unloving God in the face, to take stock of the rapes and murders and terrors and quotidian derelictions that make up the whole of human existence, and to live—whatever that kind of living looks like—accordingly. Better to know that our life is inherently a tragic one—a conclusion no less inescapable than the fact that two parallel lines will never meet."

TOMORROW: Hedgehog Noontime Discussion

We live in a moment when many people, especially young people, have difficulty imagining a future common life and viable political projects. Why has this mood of catastrophism and resignation come over us?

Join us via Zoom on Wednesday, November 2 at 12-1:30 EDT for a Hedgehog Noontime Discussion, moderated by senior editor Kyle Edward Williams. Scholar and novelist Tara Isabella Burton talk about her new essay for The Hedgehog Review, "On Hope and Holy Fools," and about Internet culture, the aesthetics of despair, and the possibility of cultivating the virtue of hope. Scholar and writer Jonathan Askonas will provide a short response and join in the discussion.

Please register for the Zoom event.