Planning Grant: Theology of Joy

Joy is increasingly vanishing from people’s experience in contemporary societies. Although poets, sages, and saints, especially those at the root of Judaism and Christianity, have celebrated joy for centuries as an essential dimension of well-being, joy has dropped out of our cultural vocabulary and is no longer a concern of academic research (including the fields of religion, psychology, and the social sciences). As a consequence, both our research projects and, more importantly, our collective pursuit of the good life are deeply impoverished. The purpose of this project is to develop a theology of joy in collaboration with various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and to do so not merely as an academic exercise but to create an academic and communal movement to shape contemporary culture to experience more joy understood not as mere positive emotion but as a summit of integral human well-being. With this project, our goal is to do within the field of theology something analogous to what "positive psychology" has done within the field of psychology. Our aim is also to develop an index of joy, a measure of the progress toward a more joyous culture. During the course of the project, we will convene five consultations that gather scholars in a variety of theological disciplines as well as in the social sciences and humanities to develop a proposal for a multi-year project that will inform and drive a new movement that places joy at its center. By rehabilitating and developing a theology of joy that draws upon and generates interdisciplinary discourse, this research will reinvigorate engagements to foster human flourishing in the academy and society. At the end of the project, we will provide a draft Full Proposal for a full, larger initiative on the theology of joy to the foundation identifying, inter alia, the key issues, scholars, and institutions that would be critical to the success of the larger initiative.