Berkley Center

In this lecture, Hirokazu Miyazaki examined personal hope as an emergent locus of articulation between the secular and the nonsecular in public debates about political and economic futures in the United States and Japan. From the recent encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI to the speeches of Barack Obama, hope has emerged as a key concept in the political theology of the present moment. Miyazaki sought to bring the political-theological deployment of hope in conversation with current debates about the economy, in particular turning to several recent efforts by Japanese public intellectuals to theorize Japan’s increasing inequality in terms of the uneven distribution of hope.