FROM OUR READERS

KRISTA TIPPETT (“On Hope,” Spring 2020) beautifully expresses the two-sided coin of hope and despair. I wake up hoping every day that we are in the age of a tectonic shift, and try to use a historian’s perspective to remember that we are only a few dozen years out from the first photo of Earth from space. I reread Archibald MacLeish’s reflection published on December 25, 1968, in the New York Times over and over and over again:

The medieval notion of the earth
put man at the center of every-
thing. The nuclear notion of the
earth put him nowhere — beyond
the range of reason even — lost
in absurdity