My friend & Orbis editor, Dr. Tom Hermans-Webster, sent me this book with a note that said, “You’re going to love this, Tripp. No, really, you are.” He was right. O’neil Van Horn’s Making Hope: Practices, Prayers, and Parables for a Changing Climate opens on page one by announcing that hope does not exist — which sounds like a branding failure until you realize he means hope is not a feeling or a thing or an object you possess, but an activity. Verbal. Processual. Something we weave together. The book is built in three movements — noticing, gathering, repairing — with nine everyday practices treated as parables: birding, foraging, composting, seed saving, mending, baking bread. It is process theology written for people who do not want to hear the word concrescence ever again, and it does the rare thing of being genuinely usable by a reading group, a Sunday school class, or a preacher looking for a sermon series. We covered why optimism and pessimism are both forms of certainty and hope is neither, why his farmer friend asking who is that? about a birdsong was a revelation, why compost undermines the entire Western notion of essence, why the shame you feel about not knowing your local trees is not your fault, and what it means that the book ends not with a trumpet but with a loaf of bread. My chicken Raven made a cameo. She said it was her favorite.
Highlights from the conversation
- “Hope does not exist.” The first line of the book and the whole argument in miniature. Hope is not a feeling, a thing, or an object — it is verbal, processual, communal, something we enact and weave together. Van Horn’s frustration is with the version of hope stitched onto tea towels and throw pillows, which means nothing to people in actual crisis. And the deeper move: optimism and pessimism are both perspectives of certainty. Certain it will work out, or certain it will not. Hope lives in the space of uncertainty. It belongs to the category of faith. Willie Jennings on hope as a discipline and Mitri Raheb on hope as what we do today are the anchors.
- “Who is that?” His friend Mary Kate, a farmer in the Ohio River Basin, heard a bird sing and asked who is that?rather than what is that? Van Horn calls it a revelation — she was speaking a different world into being. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s grammar of animacy chapter in Braiding Sweetgrass is the deeper source: Potawatomi has verbs for to be a bay, to be a tree. Tripp adds Derrida’s observation that you can board a plane where an animal is a pet and land where it is dinner. The language you internalize carries a whole set of valuations with it — and the late modern West has already de-animated most of creation into raw material.
- Composting undoes Descartes. The chapter that moves from Descartes’s wax to Octavia Butler to Genesis. Stand in front of a compost pile — grass clippings, dried leaves, eggshells, the slimy stuff — and try to name its essence. You cannot. There is no essential thing beneath the pile. The pile is just becomings intermingling: heat, air, maggots, duff. Compost pushes us out of quantitative thinking about change and into qualitative — a transformation, or if you want the theological word, a transfiguration. And the deeper point: there is nothing more closed than linearity. Something that starts, ends at the landfill, and never returns. A circle — better, a spiral — is the open thing.
- Capitalism’s scarcity is manufactured, and seed saving proves it. One cayenne plant makes fifty to seventy peppers; each pepper carries fifty to a hundred seeds. Nature’s fecundity is not scarce. What the market does is create closure around that fecundity and sell you back access to what the plant was more than willing to share. Add hybridization and genetic modification (Vandana Shiva gets the credit here) and it gets genuinely absurd. And the same story is why you feel guilty resting — capitalism has taught us our value is extracted, usually on behalf of someone else. Naming a chicken Raven is not the most efficient relationship to an egg producer. That is the point.
- The shame is not yours. Van Horn puts two leaves on the screen — a swamp white oak and a sugar maple — and his students cannot tell them apart. Then he puts up a Nike swoosh and Adidas stripes and they know instantly. The shame they feel is real, and it is misplaced. It is not a personal failing; it is the product of a culture that assigns symbolic depth to corporate logos and none to the tree you could tap for syrup. Same with attention: these technologies were designed to be addictive. Not your fault as an individual — and you still have agency in response. His best classroom assignment: sit in one place, go back once or twice a week across a whole semester, and report what wisdom you glean.
- Hope as the practice of resurrection. The closing lines of the book: by making hope, we participate in divine creativity and holy repair. It is the work of faith, and it is faithful, even if it fails. Hope is communal. Hope is communion. Hope is the practice of resurrection. Van Horn’s gloss: there is nothing more impossible, unlikely, absurd, or mystical than resurrection. To make hope in a climate crisis already worse than the projections is to commit to the utterly impossible — the you forgot the candlesticks response to being robbed, the other cheek, impossible grace. Via Miguel De La Torre’s Embracing Hopelessness: do you do justice because you are going to win, or because it is right? Van Horn jokes that he identifies as a hopeful nihilist. And Tripp closes with the Whitehead riff from a recent lecture — the brief Galilean vision flickered uncertainly not because it was wrong, but because it was right, and rightness comes with no guarantee of institutional protection.
About our guest
Dr. O’neil Van Horn is Assistant Professor of Theology at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He holds a PhD in philosophical and theological studies in religion from Drew University (where he studied with Catherine Keller), was a Louisville Institute Scholar from 2021 to 2023, and comes to theology with a background in organic agriculture and sustainability.
The book at the center of this conversation is Making Hope: Practices, Prayers, and Parables for a Changing Climate and is built to be used by reading groups, discussion groups, and preachers. His first book, out of his dissertation, is On the Ground: Terrestrial Theopoetics and Planetary Politics which is for the super nerds, particularly anyone who has ever wanted Tillich’s concept of ground re-articulated with the process modifications from volume three of the Systematic Theology made explicit.
Van Horn is offering to Zoom in with any reading group, discussion group, or congregation working through Making Hope. Reach him through the contact form at oneilvanhorn.com.
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