On Hope and Holy Anarchism offers an original scholarly work attempting to develop the standpoint of those who think of themselves as religious/Christian anarchists, or who are interested in understanding anarchism. Holy anarchism, Andrew Shanks argues, is in one sense a name for the ethos of the Sermon on the Mount. But in another sense, it is an ideal that has only now become fully thinkable: in the world of present-day civil society and its public conscience movements. Dorothy Day is officially a candidate for canonisation, expected to be the first Roman Catholic official saint to have been, in her own lifetime, a self-professed ‘anarchist’. Part One of On Hope and Holy Anarchism consists of a grand-narrative meditation on this and a critical dialogue with the great Marxist philosopher, author of The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch. Part Two consists of two portraits: one of Dorothy Day and the other of the Ethiopian Coptic Orthodox pioneer educationalist Asfaw Yemiru. Part Three is largely focused on recruiting the philosopher D. G. Leahy (1937 – 2014) to the cause of ‘holy anarchism’. Henri Bergson’s distinction between ‘static’ and ‘dynamic religion’ also features here: inasmuch as ‘holy anarchism’, Shanks argues, essentially liberates the latter from the former. Here, ‘holy anarchism’ is discussed in three genres – grand narrative/biography/[trans-]metaphysics – to provide a rounded, three-dimensional celebration. The three genres are complementary, each strengthening the other two. Hope, it is argued here, is truly a virtue insofar as it energises our response to the infinite imperatives of ‘truth-as-openness’.
