ON A SATURDAY AFTERNOON a few years ago, inching my way through the magazine racks at one of my favorite bookstores, I spotted a new title: Hope. Who could resist riffling through that? One quick riffle and I bought it, took it home, and read every word.

A small bi-monthly produced by a tiny staff in Brooklin, Maine, Hope runs deep. On racks rife with sensational news stories, "surface" mags recording every hair-do (and don't), countless car-buff magazines, the latest fads in food and shelter, Hope is an oasis. Its cover usually features a human face looking you right in the eye and inviting you to come into the magazine for a conversation.

Invite is a word Hope editor Kimberly Ridley likes to use to describe the publication's approach to its readers— "No force, no mandate, no prescriptions," but "an offering of what's possible—the example of one person making a difference, changing things for the better." Ridley also speaks of Hope's purpose in terms of "reporting on problems in a context of solutions," "enlarging the reader's sense of the possible," and wanting the readers' lives to "get bigger."

The pages of Hope are full of reports by and about people whose lives got bigger. Like Winona Ward. A former truck driver and victim of domestic violence, Ward became a lawyer and now drives around Vermont delivering legal services to abuse victims. And like Frankie Lappé. After witnessing Kenyan women walking nearly 20 miles to pick up firewood for cooking, Lappé inspired them to plant trees. Where once there was dust, now millions of trees grow. And like Scott Russell Sanders, author and teacher, who urges us to "stretch our compassion" because "the only sure way of opposing cruelty is to refuse to divide the world into friends and enemies."

Hope (online at www.hopemag.com) began in 1996 as Jon Wilson's way of "giving something back" after the unexpected success of his first publishing venture, WoodenBoat. Hope's mission?—"to inspire, inform, and affirm people who want to create positive change in the world." Billed as nonpolitical, nonreligious, and non-New Age, Hope offers an antidote to apathy, helpessness, and cynicism.

"Cynicism," says Ridley, "is a response that lacks imagination. A response that exempts one from action or caring. It never takes us anywhere." On the other hand, Ridley defines hope as "not a pastel cheery idea" but as a demanding discipline. She's inspired by author Howard Zinn's take on the power of hope: "To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

"What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

"And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory" (You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times, Beacon Press, Boston, 1994).

Winner of Folio, Utne Reader, and Library Journal awards, Hope publishes all its negative letters from readers. There are almost none. On Ridley's wall by her desk hangs a more typical letter that says, in part, "This magazine articulates the soul and addresses the human experience. It grasps what so many other magazines tiptoe around. It's real, sweet, sensitive, and full."

"We need to hear about hope in unlikely places," says Ridley, because "we need large and lasting change."

Maybe part of that large and lasting change is a magazine bold enough to name and pattern itself after such an unlikely thing as hope.