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Charles Mathewes:

Hope is transcendent because it looks for genuine novelty, not more of the same—a novelty that comes like a thief in the night, able to alter radically our lives in ways we are incapable of doing ourselves. But hope is also eschatological because while it exists in the present as an affirmative power, it also insists “not yet”; it looks forward to a radical refiguration of our lives and the world as a whole, a refiguration that will purify our ideals and resolve our conflicts, redeeming our partial goods and semi-achievements, giving us what we long for at every moment in history but cannot receive from or in history. Hope is the hope that, though we are creatures who move through history—stretched out across time, part of us “lost” as memories of the past and another part not yet arrived as the coming future—we will finally be given our whole existence fully, all at once, in a radically transfigured dispensation, which Saint Paul calls the “new creation.”