The Faculty of Theology and Religion is delighted to announce that Dr Susanna Snyder has received a grant from the McDonald Agape Foundation for 'Grounding Hope', a new research project exploring how people experience and practise hope, and what these experiences can contribute to and learn from theological understandings of hope.
'Grounding Hope’ will bring together leading international academics working with established theological traditions and as well as academics conducting empirical research into lived experiences and practices of hope. By connecting theological scholarship with empirical research, the project will examine how lived experience can enrich theological understandings of hope, with a particular focus on human agency, faith and relationships with others, identity, and creativity. It will also explores how theology can contribute to individual and shared experiences of hope and to wider public conversations in an increasingly fragmented and contested society. The project will begin with a symposium in June 2027, to be held at Wycliffe Hall.
Dr Snyder says: “I am grateful to the McDonald Agape Foundation for their generous support. This grant provides an important opportunity to advance research on hope and to develop new connections between scholarship, lived experience and wider public conversations.”
Dr Snyder is Departmental Lecturer in Applied Theology in the Faculty of Theology and Religion and founder of the Hope and Theology Network at Oxford. To find out more about her research and teaching, visit her profile here.
