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This paper seeks to argue that truth is not something that relates to telling/speaking only. Its main aim is to show that in their quest for communion with God, other human beings – and one should add – the entire creation, humans need to go beyond truth-telling toward the ways of embodying and dwelling in truth and hope. To introduce its argument, the paper proceeds in the following steps. First, it expounds a Christian perspective on truth, employing notions such as sacrament, desire, and relationality. Through the image of communion with God, a link between truth-telling and hope is outlined. Second, it tries to show that truth-telling is not only an affective but also an existential category. As such, it involves the whole of human being. Therefore, it makes sense to turn to the concept of body and embodiment when reflecting on the human pursuits of truth. The paper then, third, examines various constellations of this central claim by exploring a specific case from popular culture, namely, ‘Crocodile’, an episode from the Netflix series, Black Mirror. In particular, a proposal is made for the significance of embodying and dwelling in truth for Christian theology and practice. Finally, in the last step, this embodying and dwelling is given more concrete contours with respect to hope by probing into the images of home and feast.

This article is a revised version of the paper given at the Anthropology of Hope conference in Prague, May 2023, in response to Professor Aristotle Papanikolaou’s presentation on ‘Hope and Truth-telling’. The first part responds briefly to the affective nature of truth-telling which was presented, and queries the use of martyrial language. The second part looks at three sites on hope and truth-telling in the contemporary Catholic Church: (i) responding to the abuse crisis; (ii) ecumenical relationships, through the lens of ‘Receptive Ecumenism’; and, (iii) communal discernment, taking note of the current movement of synodality. A proposal is made to consider structures of (or structural) virtue as well as structural (or structures of) sin.