I dedicated Justice and Hope: Essays Lectures and Other Writings, published last year, to my grandchildren, but I intended this dedication, implicitly, to be to all young people. This is what I wrote.
More and more, I fear, knowledge of affliction and cruelty will test their understanding of what it means to share a common humanity with all the peoples of the earth, and to a degree almost too awful to imagine, their faith that the world is a good world despite the suffering and the evil in it. What can sustain that faith? I believe there are few questions more urgently in need of sober realism in their formulation and in the answers offered to them.
Subjected as they have been to corrosive disillusionment about political institutions, I feared then that hope had deserted young people. The student protests in response to Israel’s war on Gaza and its people have changed my mind about that. At times, the protests appear to express a joyful affirmation that this kind of political action can, indirectly, change the world. I welcome that, though with qualifications I sometimes fear will reduce the voice of hope in me to a whisper.
