Hope In Action

Respectful and effective solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) for suicidal clients Few tasks are more important—and daunting—than to help someone who is suicidal to go beyond the darkness of hopelessness to the light of hope. Hope in Action: Solution-Focused Conversations About Suicide is a unique resource providing fresh approaches to treating individuals and families where suicide is an issue. This comprehensive book provides a thorough grounding in using a solution-focused therapy approach to elicit and reinforce hope and reasons for living. Strategies are demonstrated with stories, case vignettes, and transcripts. Special applications include some of the most challenging high-risk clients that therapists treat, including people who make repeated attempts. This powerful resource offers a set of practice principles based on the existing empirical evidence in the context of clinical utility and client expertise. Hope in Action: Solution-Focused Conversations About Suicide provides case transcripts to help in role-play or rehearsal situations as well as numerous practical tips. The book also provides lists of solution-focused questions for use in various situations, including suicide crisis, the use of anti-depressant medications, facilitation of collaborative working relationships with colleagues as well as clients. Each application chapter gives therapists practical, hands-on tools and uses stories and illustrations to make the book user-friendly. The text also offers a brief appendix on the basic skills of SFBT. Topics discussed in Hope in Action: Solution-Focused Conversations About Suicide include: current knowledge about preventing suicide at the individual level helping clients to utilize their strengths even when they are in crisis how research in diverse areas supports the solution-focused approach effective treatment for couples and families when one member is suicidal basic approaches to effective therapy with young children and teens who have attempted suicide respectful, effective therapy with people who seem to have adopted being suicidal as their primary coping strategy therapeutic tools that help the therapist to stay hopeful about clients and strengthen the therapeutic relationship Hope in Action: Solution-Focused Conversations About Suicide is a valuable resource for counselors and therapists at every experience level.

Hope into Action, a charity founded by Ed Walker has a vision – of the church at the forefront of the fight against homelessness. Since 2010 it has worked in partnership with churches to supply homes, support, friendship and love for the homeless and marginalized, earning the Guardian’s Public Service Award in 2017 and an award from the Centre for Social Justice. Here, Ed tells his story of faith and struggle as he and his wife Rachel stepped out in faith, developed a new theology of sharing and saw both tragic and wonderful outcomes. Visionary, inspiring and touching, Ed’s experiences show how we can meet and grow in Christ as we interact with those in the shadows and those hidden in darkness.

‘Hope is not the product of opinion or argument . . . There has to be something else – an impetus to act, a vision, something that fires our imagination.’ At a time when many feel defeated by the world’s problems, Vincent Nichols reminds us why we need to hold on to hope – and how we can offer genuine hope to those who need it most. With questions for reflection at the end of each chapter, this stirring book will encourage people of all faith backgrounds to come together and work towards a better future for all. ‘What makes us human? . . . What holds us together across cultures, religions, gender and many other differences? Cardinal Nichols’ answers are both deeply realistic and deeply hopeful.’ Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury ‘This book . . . is an important call to action, and one that will encourage real-life transformation.’ Ben Cooley, Chief Executive, Hope for Justice

This volume contends against a major lacuna in the story of eschatology in the twentieth century by offering a historical and comparative analysis of Edward Schillebeeckx’s prophetic eschatology and Johann Baptist Metz’s apocalyptic eschatology with the goal of identifying relative advantages and limitations of these divergent eschatological frameworks for rendering a Christian account of hope that prompts action in the public arena. Rodenborn provides a fresh angle on eschatologies of hope.

Understanding how hope can work for you and help you to take on life. A book for children or adults that encourages through instilling hope.

Its November 2001. A university in dire straits, financially bankrupt burdening a debt in excess of R100-million, a disillusioned and demoralised staff complement still reeling from the trauma of retrenchments, coupled with an academic project facing collapse as student numbers dwindle by a third to less than 10 000. Is there a future for such an institution, described by some as a ‘basket case’ with very bleak prospects of survival? This was the landscape that confronted the newly-appointed Vice-Chancellor and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the University of the Western Cape. Fast forward to December 2014. The CEO retires from office, bestowing upon his successor a financially sound institution with a flourishing academic project, recording unprecedented achievements, enriching the lives of more than 20 000 students, and widely acknowledged as a research-led university. This book narrates how visionary leadership with the steadfast belief that your past does not determine your future, galvanised an entire organisation into believing that a better outcome was indeed achievable, and the will to move forward as a collective with a redefined purpose and commitment to achieve that which was once deemed impossible.

“[A] landmark book . . . Solnit illustrates how the uprisings that begin on the streets can upend the status quo and topple authoritarian regimes” (Vice). A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of activists at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them—and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argues that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of our times in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book. “One of the best books of the 21st century.” —The Guardian “No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that’s marked this new millennium.” —Bill McKibben, New York Times–bestselling author of Falter “An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways.” —The New Yorker