Existential Anxiety and Christian Hope

Abstract

The main idea behind this paper is that Christian hope can be a path to overcoming existential anxiety. Hope connects the vertical dimension, that is, faith and the meaning of life as a whole, with the horizontal dimension, i.e., love towards others and openness to communion. Both represent a correction of two deviations of modern people, namely the supposed calculability of their own lives and actions as well as social fragmentation and alienation. The two deviations prove to be a suitable ground for the application of the politics of fear, in which media mediation and fear production play rather important roles. That is why the perspective of hope is affirmed as a direct counterbalance to the perspective of fear.