We warmly invite you to our upcoming breakfast seminar held on the 19th November 2016 from 830 – 1030am at ETF. Please find the presentation here: Presentation Slides.
This breakfast seminar is open to all at no charge, although voluntary contributions towards the cost of this event will be appreciated. To register, please send an email to Peirong.lin@etf.edu by the 13th November 2016.
Courageous and Vulnerable Hope as a Power of Change
People thirst for hope. As pilgrims, we are always underway, making us in essence a hoping people, Homo Viator, as French existentialist Gabriel Marcel explicated. We don’t do hope, we are hope. This need for hope is further compounded by financial and ecological crises, as well as problems with migration and the threat of terrorism. This quest for hope has not gone unnoticed. In the recent field of positive psychology and even in economics, hope is becoming an important topic. It is also an important factor for all our leadership in society at large as well as in church.
In all vulnerability, hope trusts someone, even oneself and God. Hope is, similar to faith and love, a paradox: it empowers us and simultaneously makes us vulnerable. In the risky act of hope, courage and vulnerability merge together. It is as complex and ambivalent a concept as we, human beings are. It can be analyzed as a multifaceted ‘syndrome’ with all its complexities of feelings, modes of perception, thoughts, motivational states, activities and judgments.
In this short introduction we deal with questions such as: What is aspirational hope? What is the difference between hope and optimism? Is hope an emotion or a virtue? Is hope distinctively Christian? We “hope” to have a fruitful discussion on the topic of the significance of hope for our society.
Our Presenter
The breakfast seminar, presented by Prof. Patrick Nullens, is an introduction to the upcoming masterclasses both in Rotterdam and Leuven. The concepts shared in this breakfast seminar are part of a broader research project that ILSE is part of “Hope as an Incentive in Theological and Economic Perspective”. The project is carried out in collaboration with the Erasmus Happiness and Economics Research Organization, part of Erasmus University in Rotterdam.
This research project is fully funded by the Goldschmeding Foundation.
