In his comment, Larry highlighted some points made by Patton Dodd, who wrote Beliefnet’s “Optimism Is Depression,” (click here) about the distinction between optimism and hope. The article begins . . .

Long before “The Secret” had readers talking about how we attract good or bad things to ourselves according to how we think, I was a young convert to Christianity who believed that the message of Jesus was, well, that we attract good or bad things to ourselves according to how we think.

It was 1994, I was a new Christian, I was tender of heart, and I was impressionable. At the Pentecostal university I attended, not everyone embraced what is known as “the prosperity gospel,” but somehow I was drawn to people for whom prosperity teaching—the idea that God wants us healthy and wealthy—was part and parcel of the life of faith.