“Love's Braided Dance” — A Book Launch Event

Join the Kenan Institute for Ethics for a book launch event for a new book by Norman Wirzba, "Love's Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis."

From the publisher:

"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."

Panelists Abdullah Antepli, Polly Ha, and Brian McAdoo will offer responses to the book. This event will be followed by a reception and book signing.

Please note that the event location is the Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall (C105, Bay 4) at the Franklin Humanities Institute in Smith Warehouse.