See Molly in action at various events and at her home church, First Church Berkeley UCC.
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The risk in any story about a person moving through illness is that it will pivot into a feel-good tale of beating the odds and surviving—the kind of book my friend with cancer would have thrown across the room. Baskette avoids that by balancing her own survival story with those of parishioners she worked with who did not survive, and by being frank about the toll cancer took on her marriage, her children and the church she served."
~Kaya Oakes, from a review in America Magazine

Faith+Lead: What is hope about, for you? What brought you to this understanding? Molly Baskette: One of my favorite theologians of hope is not a religious person, but the author and activist Rebecca Solnit. She wrote in her masterwork Hope in the Dark, “Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.” 
I’m also influenced by Octavia Butler’s sci-fi Parable series, of her mantra that God is Change. We hate change because it is exhausting, and demanding—but to the person who is suffering and struggling and oppressed, change is a gift. It means however bad things are, they are not static. They may get worse, but they may also get better. I like to quote this cliché to my church folks, a little tongue in cheek, “Everything turns out alright in the end. If it’s not alright, it’s not the end.” Our stories are still unfolding. We are still becoming. 
God doesn’t send the disaster, give a 4-year-old terminal leukemia or take out half a million people with a tsunami. But God will use every disaster to draw near to us, help us dig deeper, hopefully relying less on ego and material prosperity and “success” and relying more on soul and community, nudging us to live more interdependently and vulnerably. This isn’t to say we have to be hopeful when we’re in the middle of the disaster. Being curious is a good start—asking ourselves “what might happen next? What can I learn from this? How can I grow?” 

Read the whole interview with Faith+Lead here!