My favorite description of joy comes from theologian Willie James Jennings. “Joy is an act of resistance against despair. . . . [Joy] resists despair and all the ways that despair wants to drive us toward death,” Jennings said in an interview. “Death in this regard is not simply the end of life, but it’s death and all its signatures—death, violence, war, debt, all the ways in which life can be strangled.”
