Advent Joy: Resistance Against Despair, Celebrating the Beauty of Black Joy / Stacey Floyd-Thomas & Willie James Jennings

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Part 3 of 4 in our 2023 Advent Series. Stacey Floyd-Thomas presents a vision of Black joy—which the world can't give and the world can't take away. Looking into several depictions of female agency in the Gospels, she outlines a picture of joy that celebrates beauty, redemptive self-love, virtuous pride, and critical engagement with the world. Then Willie James Jennings offers a definition of joy as an act of resistance against despair and its forces that lead to death. He presents a creative, communal joy characterized by fullness, connected to but transcending grief and sorrow.

Show Notes

• Help the Yale Center for Faith & Culture meet a $10,000 matching challenge for podcast production; click here to donate today.
• Macie Bridge and Evan Rosa introduce the episode
• Stacey Floyd-Thomas explains Black joy
• "This Joy That I Have"
• "The world didn't give it / the world can't take it away."
• Beauty and Blackness
• Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
• Womanist Theology
• Radical subjectivity
• Communitarian 
• Redemptive self-love
• Critical engagement
• Female agency in the Gospels
• Mary and Jesus at the Wedding in Cana
• Mary and Martha
• Syro-Phoenician Woman
• Willie James Jennings defines joy—"an act of resistance against despair"
• "Resisting all the ways in which life can be strangled and presented to us as not worth living"
• Singing a song in a strange land
• Making productive use of pain, suffering, and the absurd—taking them serious
• How does one cultivate joy? You have to have people who can show you how to sing a song in a strand land, laugh where all you want to do is cry, and how to ride the winds of chaos.
• "In contexts where your energies have to be focused on survival, it doesn’t leave a lot of energy for overt forms of complaint—you’re spending a lot of energy just trying to hold it together."
• The commercialization of joy in the empire of advertising—contrasting that with the peoples serious work of joy
• The work and skill of making something beautiful out of what has been thrown away
• Segregated joy—joy in African diaspora communities
• Joy is always embedded in community logics
• The Christological center of joy
• Pentecost joy—joy together
• Geographies of joy: Christians tend not to think spatially, but we should
• Public rituals bound to real space
• Hoping for joyous infection, where the space has claimed you as its own
• Where can joy be found? The church, the hospital room, the barber shop and beauty shops—“things are going to be better"

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Stacey Floyd-Thomas and Willie James Jennings
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Macie Bridge
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give