$22. Elephants celebrate when the herd is reunited after a separation, stamping around, peeing, and trumpeting with their trunks. At EL Education's 2022 National Conference: A World of Good, Sydney joined school counselor Dominique Sawyer and fellow SAC members Stephanie Kacou and Marissa Barnwell for a panel . These women have shown me what strength, determination, compassion and accountability look like and taught me to not take no s**t from anybody (lol)! $j("#generalRegPrompt").hide(); This episode featured theologians, Willie Jennings and Miroslav Volf. Its power seems inescapable. The first chimp to spot the caretaker begins hooting loudly. Joy as an Act of Resistance is the 2nd album by British rock band Idles. We are not attuned to a world in which we have to work with what's been thrown away because we are the ones who throw away. It is one the things that makes us truly human. And as we made our way out of the church and then jumped into cars to file over to the cemetery, she was the one who, along with local Black Lives Matter activists led her community in a chant to Say His Name!!. And the Yale Center for Faith and Culture conducted a three-year study of joy and its connection to the good life. Slowly but surely shes changing the lives of those she directly works with, while also helping to create legislation that ultimately will transform Colombias society into a somewhat more just and inclusive place. Joy has an edge, it doesnt exist in vacuum. If someone puts their hands on you make sure they never put their hands on anybody else again., We live in capitalism. Oops! Willie Jennings: Well, practically you have to have people who you've heard sing those songs in strange lands. Joy is Resistance - by Austin Channing Brown Joy is Resistance It's easy to feel like only the big stuff matters, but resistance to injustice is sometimes about pool, cake, and dancing. The lizard brain is hungry, scared, angry, and horny. Joy As An Act Of Resistance ( LP, Album, Orange, CDr, Album, All Media, Limited Edition, Rough Trade Exclusive) Partisan Records. I'm Evan Rosa, and I edited and produced the show. We also need moments of release and celebration to mark the small victories and restore body and mind. To make injustice the onlymeasure of our attention is to praise the Devil. Marsha was a performer and activist who dedicated herself to supporting the most vulnerable LGBTQ New Yorkers with clothes, food and resources. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world." If we relinquish our joy, we not only lose a profound source of unity, strength, and resilience, we also lose the point of it all. Movies. There were incredible women like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth before the end of Slavery, the women making lunches and marching during the Civil Rights Movement, and the women of the Black Panthers supporting the social programs and keeping the organization running. Ethologists have observed chimpanzees celebrating the arrival of a caretaker delivering a bunch of blackberry vines, a favored food, to their enclosure. I grew up in such a situationlearning how to have a good time with nothing because we had nothing. Audre Lorde wrote eloquently about how caring for oneself is an act of resistance. I think that's the first thing you have to have. In China under Mao, listening to the music of Beethoven was a crime. Suddenly its not scary or shameful to call yourself a feminist. Adreinne Waheed, photographer and author of the photo book Black Joy and Resistance documents, in its purest form, that the essence of happiness and enjoyment are inextricably linked to resistance. ALLI is a paid 10-week teen leadership intensive where 25 youth are trained in artistry, social justice, and organizing. Three weeks ago today, on Friday June 9, hundreds of family members, friends, and well wishers packed into the New Revelation Baptist Church to pay their last respects to Darius Smith, a 15-year-old child who was killed by an off-duty customs agent in Arcadia, California. He is the author of the Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race, as well as his most recent book After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging.Jennings' joy is not for the faint of heart, the fair-weather friend, or a life of ease. Black joy, as an act of resistance against white supremacy, takes center stage on Juneteenth. Miroslav Volf: What is joy for you as a theologian, as a church men, as a black man? Barbara Ehrenreich notes that in South Africa among the Namaquas, it was said that someone who converted to Christianity had given up dancing.. Let us know what you're interested in. Miroslav Volf: I don't know whether I'm maybe romanticizing things, but it seemed to me that from what I have observed growing up, but also when I have traveled, that I find more joy in the midst of oppression in almost paradoxical way, than I find in plenty. We'd invite you to bring that same joy in supporting this work. P.S. She resisted violence and oppression by asserting her existence and that of those around her. It was how you were talked to how people thought of you what you could do/couldnt do even what you were perceived as being capable of accomplishing. Listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkF_G-RF66MUK punk outfit IDLES returns with an album that improves on the brutal and politically charged style the b. This is the joy of resistance. I dont know what she meant when she said that, but I know for me it means that I still get to have my joy, my laughter, my sassiness, my thinking, my love of people. "But eventually you will find you return to your original behavior and attitudes. Willie Jennings: Despair and all of the ways that despair wants to drive us toward death, and wants to make death the final word. Take, for example, The Singing Revolution: a four-year series of protests involving mass singing demonstrations that swept across Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia between 1987 and 1991, eventually leading to their independence. 5. Yet even the smallest kernel of it can move nations. As I said, there is the kinds of spaces constituted by practices of joy, like in music, as I call it "sonic space." We're grateful that you're listening. How does one cultivate joy? Continue to get inspired by watching the movie Hidden Figures which features brilliant women like Dorothy Vaughn who used mathematical formulas to launch John Glenn into space. Your submission has been received! Round your celebration out by listening to your favorite R&B, Rock, or Country song knowing that those genres were derived from the melodious sounds of Jazz. 3. But contemporary hits are just as suspect; the Soviet Union, for example, censored songs by artists as varied as AC/DC, Tina Turner, and Julio Iglesias. Anne K. Ream is the founder of The Voices and Faces Project, a global storytelling project, the author of "Lived Though This: Listening to Sexual Violence Survivors," and a Founding Co-Chair at World Without Exploitation, the national coalition to end human trafficking and sexual exploitation. At that moment, I witnessed the joy of a community that, even in mourning, knew that it had access to one of the most powerful tools of resistance to a system of state sponsored violence and oppression that seeks to crush the joyful spirits of vibrant communities like these. And then the second thing you have to have is a willingness to want to hold on to Life, even when there is very little that makes sense in life. But the most celebratory of all animals are our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. I could not help but hear Nehemiah encourage his people to rebuild by saying that the joy of the Lord is your strength when they were being oppressed by a brutal and ruthless power. This exposure to the idea that girls are just as powerful and important as the boys next to them is how we continue to resist oppression and advance womens rights. How to reclaim freedom from all kinds of bullshit. At one level, it is tied to real spaces and places. Funded by the John Templeton foundation, gathering a diverse group of scholars and practitioners, including theologians, philosophers, pastors, psychologists, the project sought to restore joy to the center of Christian reflection, and what it means to live a good life, a life worthy of our humanity. Joy in that regard is a work that can become a state that can become a way of life. Willie Jennings joins Miroslav Volf to discuss the definition of joy as an act of resistance against despair, the counterintuitive nature of cultivating joy in the midst of suffering, the commercialization of joy in Western culture, joy segregated by racism and slavery, how Jesus expands and corrects our understanding of joy. And I hope you'll resist. Even though looking back now I have some mixed feelings on the group, at the time they did provide a new type of role model to young women and paved a path for other women in the industry by not fitting into the existing generic mold. It's the idea that in order to be a good woman, you have to be self-sacrificing. To be Black and joyful despite and against all the odds is an act of resistance. I do say you can go back upstairs and get another ticket, but I also give them all the food thats left at the end! Is this a way of living a right life in the false one, to use Adorno's phrase? You have to have conditions set up where those people who have learned how to ride the winds of chaos can say to you, "Come on, let me show you how to do that." "Find ecstasy in life: the mere sense of living is joy enough." Emily Dickinson 2. The world has enough anger and fear to last for seventy lifetimes. And there are so many silences to be broken.". Skip to content ThePodcasts TheCollaborations TheSummit TheEdit TheHost TheLockdown Lists if (this.auth.status === "not_authorized") { The whole community sits down to enjoy the feast, with even the lowest-ranking chimps getting to enjoy the treat. Like Romeo, Juliet sees love as a kind of freedom, "boundless" and "infinite.". It is mind-boggling to them that Black people can still find peace. It goes against everything that racism was designed to do. We must walk a path of joy even against our doom. We don't think spatially as we should. Prolonged states of heightened negative emotion raise blood pressure, cortisol, and respiration rate, putting stress on the cardiovascular system. For his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime. There's a very powerful analogy to, if you will, the work of the spirit at that moment, that a space is created not by you, but in a strange sort of way without you knowing it, it's for you. Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu. GLIDE remains deeply committed to the struggle for gender equality. And I think at another level, the work of joy becomes serious work, which I think in our contextand by our context, I mean in the Westthe work of joy in many ways is not fully the people's work. "Black women have been conditioned to live for other people. "Oh, the Spirit's coming." I thought it might give him something to look at, like the center of a house you keep coming back to . Now I do want to take seriously the way in which a community finds joy and creates joy and creates patterns of pleasure that are imagined to only exist in integrity when the outside others are kept out. Willie Jennings: Public rituals bound to real space. The more dehumanizing the circumstances, the more we need these markers of our humanity. And so we must risk delight. And we must know that to do so is not a distraction from resistance, but one of its greatest sources of power. We are a people who have somehow been able to sing , live, and shout Hallelujah anyhow. Jesus tells us to use joy as an act of rebellion when he says: "Love your enemy, bless the one who curses you, do something wonderful for the one who hates you, and respond to the very ones who persecute you by praying for them." (Matthew 5:44) Share joy by sharing love, which drives out fear, which leads to joy. This is joy for our time. As you can probably tell, now I don't spend much time in barbershops anymore, but back in the day when I used to spend time in barbershopsbarbershops and beauty shops are really interesting, especially in black communities, because they can be in ways that are, as I like to say, profound realities of indirection and they can be spaces of incredible joy. Marsha was a performer and activist who dedicated herself to supporting the most vulnerable LGBTQ New Yorkers with clothes, food and resources. Willie Jennings: Yeah. And joy in that regard is a work that can become a state that can become a way of life. Joy is not necessarily the absence of suffering, it is the presence of God. Miroslav Volf: Yeah. Images: Joy is an Act of Resistance by @rayoandhoney on Instagram; Publicolor before and after courtesy of Publicolor; Trash Any Color You Like by Adrian Kondratowicz. Last week I attended a dinner party inspired by Marsha P. (P for pay-it-no-mind) Johnson, who ignited the Stonewall Rebellion. - Sam Storms. How lucky to have met him. $j("#facebookRegPrompt").hide(); Rated #20 in the best albums of 2018, and #2063 of all time album.. I will read it again with an open mind and see if its just my over sensitivity to political messages and political leanings when Im looking for neutrality and joy for all. We can be fluid, flexible when we have to be. You have to have people who have been able to make you laugh in the places where all you want to do is cry. Joy Is a Beautiful Act of Resistance. Put yourself in the way of beauty." Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too., Most gun control arguments miss the point. The power of celebrations goes beyond the energy they create. When people have worked to build entire systems to break you, they are angry that you still can have joy. When I think about strong, courageous women passionately working to advance social justice, which inherently means theyre fighting oppression every day, I think of my good friend Catalina Correa Salazar. Equipping Knox with an endless and unconditional amount of love is what carries him through each day. Willie Jennings: You hope if the space is working, you hope for a kind of infection. Often there is no reason to make such choices outside the context of the primary choice that calls for them.". In context where your energies have to be focused on survival, it doesn't leave a lot of energy for overt forms of complaint. Thanks for listening. So somebody can walk into a space that have been marked by joy. 330 Ellis St., San Francisco, CA 94102 | info@glide.org. It is counter-intuitive in that regard. Amplifying Black voices through news that matters. This is the joy of the Lord that is our strength. Update on December 22, 2015 by Pastor Jack Wellman. She is a badass! Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Audre Lorde sums this idea up this clearly in her 1978 essay, The Uses of the Erotic, In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. She goes on to point out that this has often been marshaled in patriarchal societies for the oppression of women. Joy is also a manifestation of abundance. AFP NYC Board Member. People who love in a world without walls, people who love into hate, into refusal, against hope, and without fear. Joy is an act of resistance. Between the two stands Resistance.. For activists, who live with chronic stress, the risk of burnout is physiological. Joy is an act of resistance: how to reclaim your identity and find your voice - Anil Sebastian - Change Makers Podcast Joining Michael Hayman today is Anil Sebastian, the artist, musician and creative director of specialist sonic branding agency DLMDD. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave., You see, the point is that the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone., Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Joy is an act of resistance. Posted on May 17, 2022 May 24, 2022 by Dilnwaaz Brey "Claiming joy is an act of freedom and power. And there are many of us out there, more than you think. When psychologists study people engaged in communal singing, dance, or other rhythmic forms of entertainment, they find that we become connected on a physical level. People who love in a world without walls, people who love into hate, into refusal, against hope, and without fear. Part of HuffPost Black Voices. If one is forever cautious, can one remain a human being?, Resistance is always lying and always full of shit., We are like water, arent we? We uphold their memories as sacred before God. . Hi Ingrid, I am a musician and Ive been creating music and performances that bring joy and also have an activist/educational component. "If you want to be the best, you can't take the path of least resistance. Photo by Maria Baranova. a piece on the power of the garden at Rikers Island. That's why the narrator is able to say of this third Ofglen, "of course she is" Ofglen. I get to have all that no matter how ugly things look. And at the end of the day, once you got your hair cut, you leave thinking and things are going to be better. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. To be able to choose our joy and experience it, this is the freedom so many are fighting for. Would you say that these are joyful times? Willie, wonderful to have a conversation with you about joy. Now that feels a bit closer to home in this era, a desire for something long ago, far away, about to be. When I think about the role of women in social justice, I immediately think of Black women. 13. Joy as an Act of Resistance (and who, pray tell, can resist a title like that?) If you're new here, please hop onto my email list so I can send you weekly emails full of GIFs (and also podcasts, articles, and generally amusing cheerleading for . Joy lets us reclaim our humanity. Maya Angelou is a very good inspiration, especially for African American women, saying that she could rise above nations. Not enjoyment. Now Black History month is celebrated all over the globe. (II.ii.) a : the inherent ability of an organism to resist harmful influences (such as disease, toxic agents, or infection) b : the capacity of a species or strain of microorganism to survive exposure to a toxic agent (such as a drug) formerly effective against it 3 : an opposing or retarding force 4 a Weve seen how joy restores, unifies, and propels. Things arent perfect, but these bold women are responsible for a lot of change in thought around girls and women what they are capable of, their value, their position, etc. It is a part of the empire of advertisement that they do the work, the creative work, of presenting to you what is joyful and what can become part of the reality of how you create enjoyment and pleasure. In a nation that denied our humanity, surrounded by neighbors who harbored hate for us in their hearts, our futures and our children's futures have perpetually been kept under the boot of the police state, our lives snatched away by a cop's pistol or the smack of a judge's gavel. Im constantly moved and inspired by her passion to fight for underrepresented and marginalized people. But, the reality of it is that I have been in spaces of joy in hospital rooms, gathered with a family and a loved one who's passing on, but there are rituals of remembrance going on, grief processes being begun, and in the midst of that, incredible joyjoy connected to sorrow. My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite. There's also the other ways in which space exists. We've been taught that silence would . No doubt you won't find many people who regularly think about their lives in this very moment and associate joy. In 1915, a soldier named Gotthold von Rohden described a trench adorned with Howitzer cartridge cases that had been used as pots to hold snowdrops. It's a parade of laughing at the funeral, of listening to the bastards, of phlegm on the mirror. Miroslav Volf: So you need a kind of public spaces and public rituals possibly. What happens when somebody walks into a space marked by joy? Reply Helpful. Can you expand on that? Dancing was similarly reviled, and all types of celebration found themselves in the crosshairs of European colonists setting out to spread Christianity and civilization around the world. Willie Jennings: Yes. ("Joy of the Sabbath") and founded by historian Emanuel Ringelblum (1900-44). And not every church I've been is a space of joy. And how do we nurture hope? And we know thatand my own experience in churches is that that's often what happens, a kind of infection of joy. This year the theme is resistance. I remember people handing flyers to the guy I was with and not to me as if I werent autonomous, or men saying things to me like, youve got a really good record collection for a girl. As I became more aware, I found myself influenced by girls and women who were challenging the existing power structure of rock n roll. My mother, and three sisters: Jean Cooper, Zwazzi Sowo and Lillian Mark! Other soldiers wrote home requesting flower seeds to plant. Happy to read and share the best inspirational Joy As An Act Of Resistance quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes. Stories are told, jokes are told, people walk in, comments are made, and without you being spoken to directly, you've been spoken to. The name "Ofglen" says nothing about who this woman really is; her only identity is as the Commander's property. She said she tries to acknowledge the difficulties that others might encounter in these unprecedented times while also caring for herself and those around her. One example of this phenomenon is prison gardens. From the likes of Ari Up and Poly Styrene, who didnt sing about obtaining male affection or rely on stereotypical concepts of female self-worth, to outrageously hyper-sexualized women like Wendy O. Williams and Marian Anderson, who recaptured ownership of their bodies, these women were bold, outspoken, and as the kids say nowadays, woke. Seeing her and PARCES gives me hope for Colombias future. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives. The denigration of feminine forms of joy, such as romance novels and films, fashion and home decor, is another manifestation of this insidious form of repression. As Cara Page says in an interview with Adrienne Maree Brown, If were not imagining where were going, then it will constantly just be pushing back outside from inside of cages, as opposed to imagining whats happening outside of cages. Hope is a form of emotional vision that stokes our motivation and fans the flames of change. Essentially, hope is the belief that tomorrow can be better than today. It wouldn't be easy to find her, now. This is slightly embarrassing, but when talking about womens empowerment the first people that come to mind for me are actually the Spice Girls. They are killed. People who refuse to stop believing. People who refuse to stop believing. In 2017, they formed the Resistance Revival Chorus, a collective of women and non-binary singers whose central tenet is that joy is an act of resistance. You were an accessory. How on earth is anyone to find solace in the midst of such overwhelming grief? Shocked that the man would trade something so essential to his survival, Wiesel asked him, Hanukkah in Auschwitz? And the man replied, Especially in Auschwitz.. C.S. "Go find your joy. In the current national climate, it is more crucial than ever that we resist and repel the misogynist forces arrayed against us, and that we unconditionally stand with the women and LGBTQI people who are put at risk under the dangerous policies of the current administration. As I stood amid a sea of mostly young black faces at New Revelation Baptist, I found myself seeking my own new revelation by asking hard questions about what has become a dangerously mundane ritual around young black bodies. "If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they probably will not survive.". "I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. Nature, whether the wild forest or a manicured garden, has the power to soothe anxiety, reduce rumination, and restore the ability to focus. They are slandered, defamed, and discredited in the press. As I like to say, Christians, we are geographically adrift. It's clear that joy is the crown of the good life, as Miroslav Volf has said. Maya Angelou and Rosa Parks. I have no earthly idea how it happened. But what does it mean when you're at some place where the world's trash comes to you and out of that trash, you have to do something. Willie Jennings: I think this is really important for us. Recognize that pleasure is a measure of freedom, writes Adrienne Maree Brown, author of a book called Pleasure Activism, which takes as its premise that the states of being that activists are striving for, justice and liberation and wellbeing, are highly joyful states, and therefore pleasure can be a powerful tool for helping us achieve them. The reverse is also true that the secret of joy is resistance. "I look at joy as an act of resistance against despair and its forces. Joy as an Act of Resistance., an Album by Idles. Rest is vital, but rest alone doesnt create resilience. For in that moment, he truly was. She resisted violence and oppression by asserting her existence and that of those around her. Miroslav Volf: They're slightly drunk, in any case. And that's what's key, the kind of mapping of joy that would be necessary to actually start to think about the reconstituting of a different reality of joy. This week, with one year to go until the next U.S. presidential election, it seemed a good time to dig in and share a kind of blueprint for the intentional use of joy to foster change. I never saw anyone take so much crap due to her love for and commitment to women and girls as Kathleen.