Recent news brings more and more reminders that we live in troubled times, with human suffering and displacement on a massive scale brought on by natural as well as political causes. In addition to the recent hurricanes and earthquakes, our sense of living in a turbulent moment is enhanced by ever larger mass shootings and intensifying concern about nuclear weapons. Even our classic means of escape from political worries, like sports, remind us through the NFL players' protests of police treatment of black citizens that racial injustice is something some Americans cannot simply choose to escape. Trying to understand the dynamics and precursors of our current moment is an important yet daunting response to such turmoil. In this spirit of analysis and understanding, we present a special issue of Soundings on “Hope and Fear.” Just after the 2016 presidential election and the divisions it highlighted within the US, Carroll College organized an interdisciplinary conference on this theme, and a small selection of essays given there have been revised for this journal. Dane Cash of Carroll College was a conference organizer and proposed this special issue. He serves as guest editor and provides a contextualizing essay about the conference and overviews of the featured articles.The goal of these selected articles is to offer helpful insight into our current moment by looking backward and forward simultaneously and drawing on philosophy, political theory, literary criticism, and historical events to spur this reflection. Pondering these goals, I was reminded of Nathan Bracher's article, “The Twentieth Century and the Lessons of History,” in Soundings 100.3. Bracher argues that “while rightly remaining wary of glibly formulated ‘lessons of history,’ we cannot and should not eschew the complex, never-ending task of learning from the crimes of the past if we are to achieve more lucid, ethically informed approaches to the present and projections for the future” (2017: 255). To achieve this goal, Bracher recommends: “Rather than searching for ready-made, clear cut “remedies,” we should undertake a never-ending series of analyses and reflections while continually striving to achieve a less violent and conflicted world” (2017: 254). I would like to suggest one such series of analyses and reflections framed by the order of articles in this special issue of Soundings. By alternating theoretical pieces with specific case studies, we can see some common themes and patterns sharply illuminated. The first two articles, by Elvira Roncalli and Max Uphaus, take up the problem of totalitarianism and the possible antidote to it when diverse groups talk and work together. Min Seong Kim's complementary discussion of the political theories of Ernesto Laclau and Alan Badiou as Sisyphean and Promethean conceptions of political struggle is thought provoking on its own. Considering it in conjunction with Patrick O'Connor's exploration of the Danville tobacco riot of 1883, we can see the legacy of those intertwined racial and economic tensions that O'Connor describes surviving in the “hegemonic articulation” of our current political divisions. Finally, Jason Reddoch's definition of a politically engaged Stoic perspective puts in counterpoint the decidedly non-Stoic fears that Dane Cash traces in the political opinion journalism during the Korean War that echo clearly again in fears about nuclear weapons in North Korea today. Bringing different pairs of articles in conversation by reading them adjacently could emphasize other parallel themes beyond my suggestions here. While we may currently lack much in the way of good news, we certainly have limitless permutations for analysis of our social ills, and, we hope, some insights from these considerations can lead to positive change.