Some areas where our culture can grow: Faith, hope, and love

In Christian values, the greatest virtues are faith, hope, and love; the greatest of these is love. These are in stark contrast to the fear, apocalyptic expectations, and hatred that have seeped into the culture. I will admit that I have underestimated the value of faith, hope, and love many times. There is a corner of my mind that is skeptical of them as virtues compared to (say) honesty or courage. Yet people can have honesty and courage while doing things without love and without hope. Honesty and courage are virtues that can be shared by hero and villain alike. And so faith, hope, and love are the type of virtue that will give us the better direction than we would have otherwise.

"Faith" as a virtue was often a relationship-word, something similar to trust. Without faith or trust in someone or something, what remains is a free-for-all, a street brawl, a power struggle. There is no peace without faith in something. It remains to be seen if faith in each other is possible without shared values. Is our shared humanity enough to help our culture? Possibly, if we insist that we do in fact share humanity, and cease dehumanizing each other.

Hope is important as an antidote to despair. Actions of despair, "desperate" actions, have a reputation as showing bad thought, being rash and destructive. Despair prevents us from thinking clearly, prevents us from seeing solutions or from working toward them. Despair is the voice of self-sabotage; hope is the prerequisite for a solution or a reconciliation. Hope can build on the observation that life keeps trying to find a way forward, that people continue working to solve problems, that few people genuinely wish harm on their neighbor. Hope can be a thoughtful hope, considering how many imagined catastrophes have never come to pass, or have fizzled before they materialized.Those who hope in the Lord hope still more.

Taking a stand for the virtue of "love" seems awkward or embarrassing; it's easier to discuss "kindness" (which is also lacking far too often). And "love" can have unintended overtones; it may be helpful to think of it, at the most modest level, as a vested interest in the well-being of another. We do have a vested interest in each others' well-being. There can be more to love than that, but I do not see how there can be less. 

There was a popular commentator who would often say that he chose hope: that giving up is easy, and that hope was a conscious choice (or words to that effect). Let me make a conscious choice for hope.