Details
Facilitated by
O’neil Van Horn
Date/Time
Tuesdays | 6:00-7:30pm | 4 weeks | January 13 - February 10
Cost
Free to Members | $129 for Non-Members
Location
The Hive: A Center for Contemplation, Art, and Action
1628 Hoffner St Cincinnati, OH 45223 | In Person
About the Class
Domains
Description
Climate change is not a distant threat—it is here, unfolding in real time. Its impact reverberates through our relationships, ecosystems, and inner lives, often stirring anxiety, apathy, or numbness. The popular notion of “hope”, plastered on bumpers and stitched onto pillows, can feel hollow, especially when we take climate science seriously. And yet, surrendering to despair is not an option. We are called to respond, not retreat.
This course invites us into slow, still, and often quiet practices that cultivate hope, not as a guarantee of success, but as a moral and relational imperative. Together, we’ll explore how everyday acts: mending, seed-saving, composting, birding, can become parables of care and resistance, helping us make hope where it is least felt and most needed.
Guided by the book Making Hope: Practices, Prayers, and Parables for a Changing Climate and in conversation with its author, we’ll engage in embodied learning through discussion, reflection, and action. This is a space for those feeling stuck, scared, or simply weary—a place to process and proceed, not in denial of our grief, but in service of a more just and life-giving world.
Come ready to notice, gather, and repair. Hope may not promise victory, but its enactment is good, right, and necessary.
Note: We will be working directly with the book and it is highly recommended to purchase it with enough time before the start of the class as reading the introduction for shared language will be helpful for a rich conversation– here is a link for purchase. The book is sold wherever you wish to purchase.
This Class Is For:
Those feeling overwhelmed, numb, or disheartened by the climate crisis and seeking a grounded way forward
Artists, activists, educators, and caregivers longing to reconnect action with meaning and hope
People curious about how small, embodied practices—like mending, composting, or birding—can become spiritual and political acts
Anyone drawn to interspiritual reflection, ecological wisdom, and the sacredness of the ordinary
Community members who want to cultivate resilience, imagination, and relational repair in the face of ecological grief
Readers of Making Hope who want to deepen their engagement through shared practice and dialogue
Those who believe that tending to the world begins with tending to each other
Intention of the Hive
When you join a Hive experience, you're invited into our intention to create a group experience that's inclusive, rooted in mindfulness, and dynamically relational. We aspire for each Hive experience to model these intentions, and even to refine them as we continue to learn how to gather in a way that's transformative! The embodiment of these intentions by Hive facilitators, Members, and class participants is what makes the Hive the unique and healing social container that many experience it to be. To view our Hive Intentions for gathering, click here.
More About the Facilitators
O’neil Van Horn
is Assistant Professor of Theology at Xavier University. He holds a PhD in Philosophical and Theological Studies in Religion from Drew University. With a background in organic agriculture and sustainability, he is author of On the Ground: Terrestrial Theopoetics and Planetary Politics (Fordham University Press), Making Hope: Practices, Prayers, and Parables for a Changing Climate (Orbis Books), and many articles on environmental philosophy and theology.