Hope and a political imagination: Living for a better world - Professor Dion Forster

Saturday, 13 September — Commencement Ceremony and Opening of the Academic Year at the Foundation Academy of Amsterdam. Keynote Speaker: Prof. Dr. Dion Forster

Dear friends, graduates, students, faculty, and families,

What a profound joy and privilege it is to stand before you today at the Foundation Academy, a place that embodies one of the most beautiful truths of our time: that education is not a privilege for the few, but a right for all. I find that inspiring, hopeful, challenging!

To each of you graduating today: congratulations. You have endured, persevered, and grown. Your journey, marked by sacrifice, resilience, and hope, is already a bold act of imagination. As we gather to mark both the end of one chapter and the beginning of another, I want to offer a few reflections on the theme: “Hope and the Political Imagination: Living for a Better World.”

We are living in deeply uncertain and troubling times. Across Europe and beyond, we see worrying signs of a world turning inward: xenophobia, increasing nationalism, polarisation, and political movements that pit neighbour against neighbour. Migrants and refugees, (many of you among them), are often treated not as fellow human beings, but as problems to be solved, or worse, as threats to be feared.

We’ve seen attacks on access to education, dignity, and safety, especially for those who appear to be different, vulnerable, or marginalised.

And yet… yet! This is also a time of immense courage and beauty. Because even amid the wreckage, there are people who choose to behave decently in an indecent society.

I am reminded of the words of Kurt Vonnegut: “What made living almost worthwhile for me were the saints I met. They could be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.”

Today, friends, you are those saints.

But what do we mean by hope? Hope is not the same as optimism. It is not naïve. As I once wrote, echoing Nick Cave, “Hope is optimism with a broken heart.” It comes not from denying suffering, but from daring to imagine something beyond it.

Stanley Hauerwas once said: “To be a hopeful person means you rightly will want the world in which you find yourself to be a better one... But you’ll have to be patient, courageous, and imaginative for that hope to be more than a fantasy.”

Hope is optimism with a broken heart. It comes not from denying suffering, but from daring to imagine something beyond it.

That’s our task: to live in the real world, with broken hearts,and still believe in the possibility of something better.

Each of you here today has faced difficulties that many will never understand. Some of you have crossed borders, lost homes, endured injustice, learned new languages, rebuilt lives from almost nothing. And yet, here you are,graduating, dreaming, building a new life.

Your story is a testimony: that change does not always come with explosions or revolutions.

Sometimes, transformation begins with something far smaller, but equally powerful. My wife Megan and I had the privilege of visting Rome this year for the first time. There we took a walking tour in the Roman Forum and saw amazing, huge, buildings built out of stone and marble. Our group’s guide reminded us that these buildings were built in a time where there were no modern tools – no electricity, no air compressors. And, so the stone masons needed to find ways to split marble. Instead of using explosives (which did not yet exist), they would use a small piece of wood and wedge it into a crack in a slab of marble. When water is gently, consistently dripped onto it, that wood begins to expand, and with patience and persistence, it moves what once seemed immovable. The smallest thing, when patiently and consistently done, can move mountains!

Friends, the world does not always need more power. But it does always need more perseverance in courage, imagination, and kindness.

In one of my recent essays, I explored the idea of kindness as a political virtue, not sentimentality, but a radical choice to live differently.

Kindness, in its truest form, is a refusal to dehumanise others. It is a resistance against cynicism. It is political because it refuses to accept that injustice is normal or acceptable. To be kind in a cruel world is not weak… it is revolutionary! Indeed, it is the revolutionary way of Christ who transformed and is transforming the world.

the world does not always need more power. But it does always need more perseverance in courage, imagination, and kindness.

And here, at the Foundation Academy, I see that revolution taking root in the lives of our students and today’s graduates. You are being formed, not only in knowledge, but in compassion and character.

This brings me to the second part of our theme: the political imagination.

Imagination is a holy and political act. It says: the world as it is, is not the world as it has to be. We can imagine more just economies, more humane migration systems, more loving communities, and more honest politics.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Steve Biko, two people who shaped my own thinking significantly, both died young, resisting political systems of oppression. Yet they never stopped imagining. Bonhoeffer asked, “How can life be assured for the coming generations?” And Biko insisted that liberation must come from within, from the rehumanisation of those who had been told they were less than human.

Friends, to graduate from this place is not only a personal achievement. It is a public act of resistance. It says: I am here. I am worthy. I will live for a better world. To the graduates: we celebrate you today not only for what you have accomplished, but for who you are becoming. You are bearers of hope, not builders of fantasy, but people of patient courage. In your communities, your professions, your places of worship, and your households, I urge you to do three things:

1. Live decently: resist the pull of bitterness, and act with integrity and kindness.

2. Imagine boldly: ask not only what is, but what could be.

3. Act courageously: take the next step, however small, to make the world more just, more generous, and more joyful.

Let me end with this: your journey does not stop here. You have been shaped in this place for a purpose far greater than yourself. So go with hope in your heart, not naïve hope, but the kind of hope that remains even through brokenness. And remember: sometimes the most powerful thing you can do in a broken world is to simply live decently, imaginatively, and kindly.

Congratulations. Go and live for a better world.