romans on Pessimism

Faith and pessimism are incompatible. To be sure, we are not starry-eyed idealists; we are down to earth realists. We know well that sin is ingrained in human nature and in human society. We are not e...

Many people are broken and without hope. It’s not surprising that a Brooking’s report in October 2019 noted how “deaths of despair” were affecting many sectors of society, particularly in America’s he...

Doubt steals hope. And with no hope, everything that matters doesn’t feel as important anymore.

Survival requires more than the basic biological necessities we readily acknowledge—oxygen, food, and water. It also demands something less tangible but equally vital: hope. When hope vanishes, the hu...

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

Hope is the power of being cheerful in the presence of circumstances we know to be desperate.

Almost as important as oxygen for human survival is hope. According to Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, “Since my early years as a physician, I learned that taking away hope is, to most people, like pronounci...

It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope.

Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all... As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope beg...

Major Harold Kushner was a prisoner of the Viet Cong for more than five years. Kushner describes one of his fellow American prisoners, a tough twenty-four-year-old Marine who had made a deal with thei...

To focus our expectation in an otherworldly salvation has the potential to dissipate our resistance to societal evil and the dedication needed to work for the redemptive transformation of this world.

Major Harold Kushner was a prisoner of the Viet Cong for more than five years. Kushner describes one of his fellow American prisoners, a tough twenty-four-year-old Marine who had made a deal with thei...

Discouraged not by difficulties without, or the anguish of ages within, the heart listens to a secret voice that whispers: "Be not dismayed; in the future lies the Promised Land.

Hope is one of the Theological virtues. A continual looking forward to the eternal world is not as some modern people think, a form of escapism or wishful thinking. But it's one of the great thing...

Writer Michael Novak says that doubt is not so much a dividing line that separates people into different camps, as it is a razor’s edge that runs through every soul. Many believers tend to think doubt...

The deepest, the only theme of human history, compared to which all others are to subordinate importance, is the conflict of skepticism with faith.

Hope is the physician of each misery.

Everyone wants it. It’s the thing that fuels what we do. It’s the thing that stimulates courage and perseverance. It’s what gets you through the tough times and keeps you from quitting. It’s hard to b...

Sometimes it is helpful to see what life looks like on the other side of faith, that is, for those who believe that God does not exist. Bertrand Russell, the renowned philosopher and avowed atheist, h...

[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.

Because of this we have hope: Two men look out through the same bars One sees mud, one sees stars.

Having hope is hard; harder when you get older.

Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great , interviewed Admiral Jim Stockdale, the highest-ranking officer in the Hanoi Hilton prisoner of war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Regarding the ...

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

The singular mark of patience is not endurance or fortitude but hope. To be impatient . . . is to live without hope. Patience is grounded in the Resurrection. It is life oriented toward a future that ...

To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.

It’s part of the life cycle of every living thing to grow and mature. It’s also natural for us to hope that we will be better people today than we were yesterday and that the things that trouble us at...

Let us drink to the success of our hopeless cause.

Most of our assumptions have outlived their uselessness.