Hoping Against Hope Quotes

“By religion I mean a way to hail the glory of the smile, to magnify the glory of the rose, a way to hail a world full of grace. It is a way to affirm the grace of life, of all life, not just ours, and to affirm the world, living and nonliving, every world, not just our little corner of this universe. Its ultimate virtues are faith and hope and love of the smile. Its ultimate prayer is to say yes to the promise of the world, amen to life in all its mortality and contingency, "come" to the event of the world, to time and its becoming, yes to what we cannot see coming. Yes, yes, amen, come. While keeping our fingers crossed that life is not going to be a disaster (a lost star).”
― John D. Caputo, Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim

“On my reading, the ultimate "religious" gesture lies in the affirmation of the unconditional, and the unconditional requires a double and symmetric risk. First, the risk that God takes to disappear into the world without remainder, into the rose blossoming unseen and for a while, off in a distant corner of the universe. Secondly, the corresponding risk on our part is to live like that rose, to affirm life unconditionally, without the expectation of a reward or the fear of a punishment.”
― John D. Caputo, Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim

“Q. But is not eternal life the highest and the best, the greatest good?
A. That is to confuse the unconditional with the eternal. [...] Lacking the respiration of time's passing we would expire before our time, simply giving up the ghost and without quite dying live on as un-dead. It is mortality that gives life vitality; immortality is lethal. The fruit of the tree of life is poisonous. Immortality is the really forbidden fruit. That life takes a fleeting and evanescent form does not demolish its meaning; it defines it.”
― John D. Caputo, Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim

“I am not dreaming of doing away with religion. I am trying to save religion, not only from its critics but from itself. I am trying to recover something that is going on in religion, something that religion "harbors", meaning both keeps safe and conceals. Religion hovers over the abyss of the gift and it is afraid to look down. If you are suspended over an abyss and what suspends you is without why, if your grounds are groundless, don't look down. Just go where you cannot go.”
― John D. Caputo, Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim

“A belief (doxa) expresses a "position" and it comes accompanied by supporting propositions, like buttresses that keep orthodoxy's cathedrals from toppling over. Orthodoxy is uprightness, which is alright on a flat earth, but in a global world means we are all pointing in a different direction.”
― John D. Caputo, Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim

“A. When Leotard poses the problem of the inhuman, he gets as far as "purposelessness" and then seems to stop. What he takes to be an objection to life is rather a clue to its real point. Purposelessness is not a problem but the very condition of grace, of the gift of grace, which comes without benefactor or debt. Life is not a coupon you turn in for a reward at the end. Iyt is not an admission ticket for a trip to another world. Life is not trying to reach it "end."
Q. Don't you see what you are saying? If it is purposeless, it is meaningless.
A. It is without a purpose, not because it falls short of a purpose, like an obsolete tool that no longer serves a use, but because it is in excess of a purpose. It is not less than purposeful but more than useful. It is without a purpose in the sense that it cannot be treated as means to some long-term and external end; it does not serve a purpose like that. A particular thing in the world may be of service to another, but the world as a whole is not in service.”
― John D. Caputo, Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim

“A belief (doxa) expresses a "position" and it comes accompanied by supporting propositions, like buttresses that keep orthodoxy's cathedrals from toppling over. Orthodoxy is uprightness, which is alright on a flat earth, but in a global world means we are all pointing in a different direction.”
― John D. Caputo, Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim

“The divine quality of even the most quotidian things is released at the very moment they cease being a means to an end, at the very instant in which they are greeted without why and hailed as full of grace. But this quality is suppressed so long as temporal things are seen as a step on a ladder of ascent to eternity.”
― John D. Caputo, Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim