On Hope and Holy Anarchism

On Hope and Holy Anarchism offers an original scholarly work attempting to develop the standpoint of those who think of themselves as religious/Christian anarchists, or who are interested in understanding anarchism.Hope, as Shanks argues, is truly a virtue insofar as it energises our response to the infinite imperatives of ‘truth-as-openness’.Holy anarchism, meanwhile is in one sense a name for the ethos of the Sermon on the Mount. But in another sense, it is an ideal that has only now become fully thinkable: in the world of present-day civil society and its public conscience movements. Take for example Dorothy Day, now officially a candidate for canonization, expected to be the first Roman Catholic official saint to have been, in her own lifetime, a self-professed ‘anarchist’.Containing critical dialogue with the great Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, recruiting philosopher D. G. Leahy to the cause, and portraits of Day and the Ethiopian Coptic Orthodox pioneer educationalist Asfaw Yemiru, Shanks makes a compelling case.Posthumously published, this volume is Andrew Shanks' final work.