A01=Norman Wirzba
agrarian studies
Anthropocene
Author_Norman Wirzba
braiding sweetgrass
built environment
Category=QRAB
Category=VS
Category=VXA
Desperation
Displacement
environment
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_mind-body-spirit
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_self-help
faith
farming
Flourishing
Forgiveness
Hope
Joy
kimmerer
Love
love for the land
place
refugees
theology
wendell berry
Product details
- ISBN 9780300285611
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 25 Nov 2025
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
A moving exploration of the place of hope in the world today, drawing on agrarian principles
In this series of meditations, Norman Wirzba recasts hope not as something people have, like a vaccine to prevent pain and trouble, but as something people do. Hope evaporates in conditions of abandonment and abuse. It grows in contexts of nurture and belonging. Hope ignites when people join in what Wendell Berry calls “love’s braided dance”—a commitment to care for one another and our world.
Through personal narratives and historical examples, Wirzba explores what sustains hope and why it so often seems absent from our vision of the future. The vitality of hope, he maintains, depends on a collective commitment to care for the physical world (its soils and waters, plants and animals, homes and neighborhoods) and to promote the moral, aesthetic, and spiritual ideals that affirm life as good, beautiful, and sacred.
Engaging with such contemporary topics as climate change, AI and social media, and the intensifying refugee crises and drawing on the wisdom of James Baldwin, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Martha Graham, and others, Wirzba offers a powerful argument for hope as a way of life in which people are intimately and practically joined with all the living.
In this series of meditations, Norman Wirzba recasts hope not as something people have, like a vaccine to prevent pain and trouble, but as something people do. Hope evaporates in conditions of abandonment and abuse. It grows in contexts of nurture and belonging. Hope ignites when people join in what Wendell Berry calls “love’s braided dance”—a commitment to care for one another and our world.
Through personal narratives and historical examples, Wirzba explores what sustains hope and why it so often seems absent from our vision of the future. The vitality of hope, he maintains, depends on a collective commitment to care for the physical world (its soils and waters, plants and animals, homes and neighborhoods) and to promote the moral, aesthetic, and spiritual ideals that affirm life as good, beautiful, and sacred.
Engaging with such contemporary topics as climate change, AI and social media, and the intensifying refugee crises and drawing on the wisdom of James Baldwin, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Martha Graham, and others, Wirzba offers a powerful argument for hope as a way of life in which people are intimately and practically joined with all the living.
Norman Wirzba is the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Christian Theology at Duke Divinity School, as well as director of research at Duke University’s Office of Climate and Sustainability. His books include Agrarian Spirit: Cultivating Faith, Community, and the Land and This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World. He lives in Hillsborough, NC.
