Religious Hope: Moral Agency and the Expectancy of the Good

Abstract

While the previous chapters have focused on religious faith, the present chapter deals with hope and its importance for morality and religiousness. Although there has been renewed interest in hope in many different disciplines, ranging from medicine to theology, this interest is largely absent in contemporary philosophy.1 I believe this fact helps explain why scholars have tended to overlook the central role of hope in the theories of Kant and Kierkegaard.2 This chapter tries to remedy this omission by showing how Kant and Kierkegaard sketched — albeit in different ways — ambitious and interesting accounts of hope. This chapter starts with Kierkegaard since his approach is more traditional than Kant’s.