Description: To be hopeful is to be ultimately realistic in the face of every reason for despair.

Question: Are you generally optimistic or pessimistic about the way the world is headed?

Transcript: I am hopeful. There’s a difference between being optimistic and being hopeful. Optimistic suggests that I . . . I expect everything to turn out right and I have good vibes about everything. Hopeful means that, in spite of all the bad things that you really do see, and that really are out there, you take the long view. And in the long view you have confidence that right will out . . . I am hopeful. I have the long view. The short run is rather nasty, brutish and short to quote Mr. _____. And that’s my view of the world. This is a difficult, tough place. And people will, when given the opportunity, usually do the wrong thing. They’ll try everything until the right thing eventually comes along. So I’m not optimistic in the immediate sense that, you know, that I think there will be peace in the Middle East, or that we’ll give up our addiction to oil, or we’ll be nice to our neighbor. I’m not optimistic in that sense. I am hopeful in the long run that we’ll find a way through all these dispiriting realities and unhappy truths . . . we will find a way to make our way through that. And the only way that I can think of that is to think of things that transcend that. That’s why I reread every two years St. Augustine’s “City of God”. There’s a great moral there. There’s a great ideal beyond this fallen world in which we find ourselves. It’s why I still believe in inspirational biographies. I sort of quote Jesse Jackson. You know, “Give hope a chance! Keep hope alive!” and so on and so forth. I’m not altogether sure that the social or political process is the way to do that, but I think people need to be possessed of powerful ideas and ideals ______ almost the impossible thing. Again, Don Quixote kind of gets people moving, and I’m convinced that that hope . . . To be hopeful is to be ultimately realistic in the face of every reason for despair. So that I am, as Mr. Kennedy once described himself, I am an idealist without illusions. I think that’s a lovely phrase.

Question: What gives you hope?

Transcript: Dealing with my students gives me the most hope. I see an enormous range of talent and opportunity in the students that pass through my courses, and through the church, and through the other settings in which I meet young people here and across the country. I have tremendous hope in the rising generation. I believe in them. I believe not only are they, in terms of the initial statistics, smarter than their parents. I believe that they are less capable of being seduced by the talents and the treasures of this world. That they have a higher standard of what they want, and what they feel they deserve, and what the world requires. I look to them to . . . to produce, in some sense, this ideal world. Their parents have had their chance and they’ve squandered it. There’s not much there to be had, it seems to me. But in these young kids that we produce regularly each year out of college despite this one, I believe, is the world’s best chance, the world’s best hope. That gives me cause for encouragement.

Recorded on: 6/12/07