Listening for Joy in an Age of Despair: The Religious Lives of Older (Anglican) Christians

Joy is a basic human emotion with a correspondingly fundamental place in Christian theology. But what has it meant to feel joy in the context of pandemic despair? This project develops a theology of joy that takes seriously everyday experiences of joy among older (Anglican) Christians and the realities of despair in which these experiences have often been shaped. In the first phase of the project, we will curate a series of recorded conversations in the style of Radio 4’s ‘The Listening Project’ across four Anglican churches in the Diocese of Southwark, inviting pairs of older Christians to co-narrate pandemic experiences of joy. In the second phase, the inter-disciplinary research team will meet to analyse together and conversationally the recorded data with the aim of producing an affectively-driven theology of joy for an age of despair, capable of pushing discourse on joy to new levels of credibility and coherence.