Joel Sternfeld
(b. 1944)
Looking Across the Corrib River to Claddagh Quay, Galway
1985, Ektacolor print
15 3/4 x 20 in.
As a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western European culture, I cannot help but think of the ways in which presumption ‹ that moral habit of a consumer culture ‹ suffocates hope. Consumption narrows our perspective to what is immediate, what can be used and discarded, what the universe owes us. This sense of entitlement blinds us to the possibility of an Other: what might stand over and against us, resist our appropriation, fill us with awe, wonder and perhaps even terror.
The fundamental religious impulse, wrote William James, is the desire for "more." He meant not more things to consume, but rather the More that transcends us, displaces us as the center of our universe, and thereby paradoxically fulfills our deepest longings. This habit of hope leaves the marketplace of presumption and waits in yearning for what it cannot demand. Leaving the maddening crowd, head shaved (be it monk or punk), hope looks out over the infinite seas toward a distant horizon. Hope desires the more ‹ what Saint Ignatius Loyola called the semper major: "the ever greater" than what we can imagine.
Stephen Schloesser, S.J.
Professor of History