Making Meaning Now: Hope Amid Chaos
Across living rooms, Zoom calls, and kitchen tables, people are reimagining faith and community in the midst of crisis. Making Meaning Now is our love letter to resilience, connection, and possibility.
The world is loud with heartbreak right now. Genocides rage. Groceries cost more than grace. The air feels thick with exhaustion, the kind that seeps into our bones. And yet, somehow, in the cracks of all this chaos, people are still reaching for one another. Still cooking, creating, caring. Still dreaming of worlds that don’t yet exist.
That’s where Making Meaning Now began, somewhere between grief and imagination, between what’s crumbling and what might still be born. Between October 2023 and January 2025, Faith Matters Network asked a question that felt both simple and sacred: How are people making meaning right now? We turned to artists, organizers, faith leaders, and culture workers — many of them Black, brown, queer, all tender with fatigue. We came to listen and to hold with. What we heard was a symphony of wisdom, resistance, and wonder.
Meaning-making, we found, is not a lofty academic or theological concept, it’s survival. It’s the everyday negotiation between our lived realities and the sacred. It’s the quiet question humming under our breath: What do we need to make it through our days? How do we live like another world is possible, even now? For the people we spoke with, meaning was being made not in churches or boardrooms, but in living rooms, over kitchen tables, in dance circles and protest lines. It was made through food, through friendship, through prayer, through rest.
People named the ache: the cost of living, the cost of truth-telling, the rising tide of anti-Black, anti-trans, and anti-human laws. They spoke of burnout and disillusionment, of trying to hold hope while watching the world unravel. And yet, right alongside that ache, they named the medicine: lineage, laughter, the land, principled struggle, and love.
Hope, in this project, is not a theory — it’s a practice. It’s the way a community meal becomes communion. The way an honest conversation becomes prayer. The way exhaustion turns into imagination when someone else says, “Me too.” Participants told us they find meaning in small and sacred places: the wisdom of elders, the courage of youth, the sound of laughter spilling out of a kitchen window, the memory of those who didn’t survive but taught us how to live anyway.
Across every interview, gathering, and retreat, we saw how deeply people long to belong — to something honest, something rooted, something real. We saw that faith, for many, no longer fits in the narrow halls of institutions. It has moved outside, into the streets and soil, into art and activism, into the messy, marvelous act of staying human.
Making Meaning Now is a love letter to that movement. It’s an offering to all those who keep showing up — with their stories, their tears, their courage. It reminds us that the work of meaning-making is collective and alive, stitched together from the laughter of strangers and the prayers of ancestors.
As we close this chapter, we hold a simple truth: meaning is not something we find. It’s something we make — together, again and again, even here, even now. We are thrilled to share our sacred findings with you.
