Spring 2025

HOPE AND DESPAIR

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Spring 2025

HOPE AND DESPAIR

Hope and Despair

mARCH - May 2025

Spring is undoubtedly a season of rebirth. Just when we despair that we might never see green again, the earth gently rallies from the silence of winter. Leaves begin to unfurl, blooms appear, and the sun shines brighter. Life springs out of cold and darkness into warmth and light, and all around us, creation shouts the praise of the one who touches our hearts and turns them from dead stone to living flesh. In some ways, it is easy to find celebration and hope in this season.

But in springtime, we also discover a tension between hope and the human tendency to despair. Before we arrive at the crashing joy of Easter, we must first pass through the Lenten season and a keen awareness of our mortality. Before Christ rose from the tomb, He had to be stricken, smitten, and afflicted. Before gardens rise from the dirt, seeds must first die in burial. As God makes all things new, we must still journey homeward, often through pain and suffering. This tension will teach and shape us if we let it.

Despair can hold many guises, and this season we will peel back the layers and note how it hides in our lives as Christians and in the world around us. We will also explore what it looks like to hold hope–the gritty, robust kind — amid our grief and the broken story that despair mutters. In this season, we will focus on what hope truly is (and what it isn’t) and lean into ways that we can “practice resurrection” as Wendell Berry put it.

FOR THIS SEASON

Featured Articles
Imagination Redeemed
- C.S. Lewis, God, and Tears (feat. Michael Ward)
- Meeting God in Our Tears (Bonus Episode)
- The Battle with Despair
- Julian’s Hazelnut
  (coming April 5th)
- Practicing Resurrection
  (Coming May 9th)
Believe to See (Featured)
- "Insert Perfect Title Here"
- Effective Christian Characters
- Celtic Pub Night
  Friday, March 28, 2025
  6:00pm – 8:00pm
- Philosophy by the Fireside (with Dr. Vander Lugt)
  Saturday, March 15, 2025
  6:30pm – 9:30pm
- Guest Lecture: Dr. Wesley Vander Lugt
  Friday, March 14, 2025
  7:00pm – 9:00pm
- The Common Room
  Saturday, March 1, 2025
  12:00pm – 5:00pm
Visual Artist Feature
- Suffering Made Sacred: Glitter, Hope, and the Art of Dylan Mortimer

VIEW FULL 2025 CALENDAR

View Full resources and anselm archives →

March 25

For Lent

When tempted to despair, the Psalms of lament help us learn to speak grief and hope in the same breath. Paul Buckley, at an Imagination Redeemed Conference breakout session, explores (and yes, sings) Psalms of lament. Watch Now →

Featured Content

ON TEARS, LAMENT, AND LENT

The Battle with Despair

Elizabeth Bam joins the Imagination Redeemed podcast to discuss stories from the Faerie Queen and the Shawshank Redemption in an exploration of how to battle despair.

C.S. Lewis, God, and Tears (feat. Michael Ward)

Dr. Michael Ward uses various writings of C.S. Lewis as literary illumination to help us understand joy and tears even more deeply.

Meeting God in Our Tears (Bonus Episode)

Chase Whitney emphasizes the significance of tears as a uniquely human experience, and discusses how joy and tears can make room for each other as we seek God in our lives.

How Faith Defeats Us

A reflection on Reformation
poetry and its glimpse into
the death found in faith,
and the life given through
grace.

A Longing Rooted in Loss

Sometime in the 10th century, an Old English poem is recorded in a book donated to Exeter Cathedral — a poem about an unmoored exile who has lost his home and now roves the earth searching for a new one.

What Lent Feels Like

But for now, it is enough to get back up and roll away the stone.

What Christians get wrong about Lent

Working Through Lent with Dante

Imagination Redeemed Podcast (March Episode)

In every episode, we retell one of the great stories, then follow its illumination to delve deeper into conversation about how to enter into the life of the Christian imagination.

“The Battle with despair”

Being in the grip of despair is hard to describe. Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queen gives image to not only the Cave of Despair, but also what restoration looks like.

listen now

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