Fragile Virtue for a Fragile Age

Is it possible to be hopeful and pessimistic at the same time?

“Yeah, but it ain’t gonna happen.”

One pastor admits that thought goes through his mind every time he includes a petition for world peace in the pastoral prayers he offers in worship services or other public prayers.

“Yes, I pray for world peace,” he says, “but I do it against a strong undercurrent of internal pessimism that keeps insisting that such peace isn’t possible. As a whole, we humans are trapped in depravity, so there’s always conflict somewhere.”

Perhaps he was thinking of verses like Jeremiah 17:9 — “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (KJV).

Who indeed? But many of us would agree that human shortcomings are a primary reason that world peace is an elusive dream. It seems that there are always wars around the globe.

Nonetheless, many of us pray — if not for world peace, then for other things that seem impossible:

• the defeat of cancer,
• an end...