Willie Jennings / Against Despair and Death: Cultivating and Gathering Joy in an Embodied Act of Resistance

Willie Jennings defines joy in a surprising and profoundly physical way—as an act of resistance against despair and death. He explains joy as, "Resisting all the ways in which life can be strangled and presented to us as not worth living." Here, in a 2018 talk for the Theology of Joy and the Good Life Project, Willie Jennings comments on the powerful, embodied act of resistance that joy calls for, examining its scope and cultural context, exploring the musical form of the blues as a space for commonly held joy, and envisioning a pathway of life through the valley of the shadow of death.

About Willie Jennings

Willie Jennings is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, Africana Studies, and Religious Studies at Yale University; he is an ordained Baptist minister and is author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race,Acts: A Commentary, The Revolution of the Intimate, and most recently, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging. You can hear him in podcast episodes 7, 13, and 57 of For the Life of the World.

Show Notes

• Watch Willie Jennings's 2018 lecture "Gathering Joy"—from the Theology of Joy and the Good Life Project, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation
• From The Fellowship of the Ring, by J.R.R. Tolkien: "‘Despair or folly?’ said Gandalf. ‘It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not. It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the enemy! For he is very wise and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this, we shall put him out of reckoning.’ ‘At least for a while,’ said Elrond. ‘The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.’”
• “The first thing that must be said about joy is that it is a work.”
• “The Black church folks I knew understood that joy work begins with renouncing despair, renouncing despair by angling one's body against it.”
• James C. Scott: Domination and the Arts of Resistance
• “Despair has always been a currency born of death.”
• “This is the art of making pain productive without ever trying to justify or glorify suffering.”
• Hebrews 12:2
• “Jesus's joy was a joy found in contradiction, not in the resolution of contradiction.”
• “Joy work, my friends, always lives close to addiction. Addiction is the anti-side, the shadow side of joy work.”
• “Even faith, any religious faith can be captured in addiction once it aligns itself with death.”
• “Joy work rooted in Jesus is always work of the creature, vulnerable, fragile, and unstable, and in need of community and communion.”
• “Music and joy have a long and celebrated history together among Black diaspora peoples. This sonic space often becomes a womb for joy, where it could live and breathe, take flight through sound, weaving together bodies and places in joy and habitation, the joy of the body and the joy of the place becoming one.”
• “The blues at essence is a method of working contradiction and dissonance into a statement of pain.”
• “We are yet to fully appreciate the role of the blues in creating sonic space, a space that many people can inhabit at the same time.”
• “Too many Christians however, continue to promote segregated joy work through the limited ways we imagine life together bound as it is by racial reasoning and geographic segregation.”
• John 15: 8-13
• Albert J. Raboteau: “Slave Religion”
• “A joy that moves through boundaries and overcomes social fragmentation requires the desire to locate joy work in new spaces that become more than a search for new commodities to consume.”

Production Notes

• This podcast featured theologian Willie Jennings
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Martin Chan, Nathan Jowers, Logan Ledman, and Annie Trowbridge
• 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