Faith When Hope is Lost: Holding Fast to the Ethics of Librarianship in Difficult Times

For me, public librarianship has always been an act of faith. Faith in the transformative power of knowledge. Faith in the right of every individual to access information freely. Faith that libraries serve the public good, providing sanctuary and possibility in an ever-changing world.

But what happens when that faith is tested? When library workers find themselves under threat for upholding the core values of the profession—access, intellectual freedom, equity? When policies, politics, or public pressures seek to dismantle the very principles that make libraries a beacon of democracy? In times like these, hope—the belief that our actions can bring about real change—can feel impossibly distant.

Standing Firm When Hope Feels Out of Reach

There are moments in life and work when something cannot be undone, fixed, or made right—at least not in the way we wish. Maybe it’s a book ban that passes despite our best advocacy, a position lost due to speaking out, or a community turning against its librarians. In these moments, we may still believe in intellectual freedom, in access, in equity—but we no longer believe that our actions will necessarily change the outcome.

This is what it means to have faith without hope: to trust in the principles of librarianship, to uphold our ethics, even when we cannot see the way forward.

Faith, in this sense, is not about certainty or control. It is about living with mystery, with surrender, with trust. It is about holding on to the belief that what we do still matters, even if the results are invisible, even if the fight seems endless.

The Core Values as a Guide

The Core Values we honor as students and practitioners of library arts and sciences are not just aspirational statements; they are the foundation of our work. They declare a shared set of ideals that unite library workers, trustees, volunteers, and advocates throughout the nation.

These values—Access, Equity, Intellectual Freedom, Privacy, Community empowerment, and Sustainability—are not contingent upon convenience. They are not upheld only when it is easy or safe to do so. They are our bedrock, even when standing upon them comes with risk.

To hold fast to these principles in a time of challenge is to practice faith. Not a passive faith, but an active one—one that keeps showing up, keeps making space, keeps bearing witness to the right of every person to seek knowledge and make their own informed decisions.

The Librarian’s Choice: Love Over Fear

In moments of uncertainty, we have a choice. We can choose fear—self-preservation at the cost of our values—or we can choose love. Love for our communities, love for the transformative power of books and ideas, love for the very mission that drew us to this work in the first place.

Hope may not always be possible. We may not always see the impact of our advocacy or our resilience. But we can still choose to believe in the worth of what we do. We can still stand in the knowledge that libraries—our libraries—matter, not simply because they are mystical places fueled by the imagination of our writers, artists and thought leaders, but because they represent something worth upholdiing: the public’s right to learn, to think, to question, to grow.

And perhaps, in that act of faith, hope is not so far away after all.