Words of Resilience and Hope Amid the Trump Chaos

The Convocation Team shares excerpts about hope from our most recent books.

Feb 11, 2025

At the end of our last Convocation Unscripted show, we each shared an excerpt from one of our recent books that addressed the themes of resilience and hope. You can watch the readings in the video clip and read along below. We’ve also included a link to the entire last show—which we conducted live with over 600 of you—at the end of the newsletter. We’ll be back in your inbox each Friday with future Convocation Unscripted episodes and hope you’ll join us for our next live show on March 6 at 5pm ET (registration link to be sent out the week before).

We hope these words will help buoy and encourage you in these challenging times.

From Robby

At this point in the American story, a tidal wave of equity and justice, if that is what it might become, still seems a building swell far offshore. Nonetheless, I remain convinced that the waters of justice are rising in a way that indeed feels different from any other in my adult lifetime.
Buoyed on those waters are lights that are helping us find our way. I have been fortunate to encounter some of these lights firsthand, and to learn from others, in my travels for this book. A group of mixed-race kids fanning out in Sumner, Mississippi, filming documentary projects that tell their stories alongside Emmett Till’s. Plantation owners standing with sharecroppers to tell the truth in the Mississippi Delta. A white, Black, and Latino trio determined to bring to light the lynchings in Duluth, and the three thousand Duluthians who showed up for the unveiling of a city’s memorial to the victims of a mass lynching to express their commitment to a new history. A white church in Tulsa confessing its role in covering up acts of mass white racial terrorism. The leader of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church kneeling to kiss a Native American woman’s hand. A Black international tennis star as the last man standing on Monument Avenue in the former capital of the Confederacy. A president issuing a proclamation honoring Indigenous Peoples’ Day. A Native American Christian minister working on behalf of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican band and with the Minnesota Council of Churches to help white Christians be not just smarter, but better people. The determination, against all odds, of Native American leaders across generations to hold the US to its word and treaty obligations and to maintain their dignity amid endless broken promises and dismissals by our government and leaders.
The efforts highlighted in these pages show us what can happen when just a few dedicated souls decide to tell a truer story about who we are and then harness the energy unleashed by that confession for creative action. Taken together, along with the myriad of other such efforts happening across the country, they reveal unrealized possibilities for our nation. While the destination seems scarcely discernible on the horizon, these beacons are sufficient, if we persist, to help us chart a different course.

-An excerpt from The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future.

From Diana

Gratitude is defiance of sorts, the defiance of kindness in the face of anger, of connection in the face of division, and of hope in the face of fear. Gratefulness does not acquiesce to evil--it resists evil. That resistance is not that of force or direct confrontation. Gratitude undoes evil by tunneling under its foundations of anger, resentment, and greed. Thus, gratitude strengthens our character and moral resolve, giving each of us the possibility of living peaceably and justly. It untwists knotted hearts, waking us to a new sense of who we are as individuals and in community. Being thankful is the very essence of what it means to be alive, and to know that life abundantly....
Gratitude empowers us. It makes joy and love possible. It rearranges the way we see and experience what is all around us. Gratitude makes all things new. It transforms how we understand what is broken and gives us the ability to act more joyfully and with hope. That is why gratitude is central to all the world's religions. As a practice, it embodies the wisdom of humanity's greatest spiritual teachers: the love of neighbor. Gratitude takes us from abstract belief to living compassion in the world. Gratitude is strongest, clearest, most robust, and radical when things are really hard. Really hard. All-is-lost hard.

-An excerpt from Grateful: The Subversive Practice of Giving Thanks

From Kristin

Although the evangelical cult of masculinity stretches back decades, its emergence was never inevitable. Over the years it has been embraced, amplified, challenged, and resisted. Evangelical men themselves have promoted alternative models, elevating gentleness and self-control, a commitment to peace, and a divestment of power as expressions of authentic Christian manhood. Yet understanding the catalyzing role militant Christian masculinity has played over the past half century is critical to understanding American evangelicalism today, and the nation’s fractured political landscape. Appreciating how this ideology developed over time is also essential for those who wish to dismantle it. What was once done might also be undone.

-An excerpt from Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

From Jemar

But it’s something about the spirit of justice that raises up like a war horse. That horse that stands with its back sunk in and hears that bell— I like to say the ‘bell of freedom.’ And all of a sudden, it becomes straight, and the back becomes stiff. And you become determined all over again.

-Myrlie Evers-Williams, as quoted in The Spirit of Justice: True Stories of Faith, Race, and Resistance