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The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found

  • Hardback
  • Publisher: Eerdmans Publishing Company
  • 14.5 x 21.9 x 2.8 cm

£18.12

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"My vocation was supposed to be joy, and I was speaking at funerals."

Shortly after being hired by Yale University to study joy, Angela Gorrell got word that a close family member had died by suicide. Less than a month later, she lost her father to a fatal opioid addiction and her nephew, only twenty-two years old, to sudden cardiac arrest. The theoretical joy she was researching at Yale suddenly felt shallow and distant--completely unattainable in the fog of grief she now found herself in.

But joy was closer at hand than it seemed. As she began volunteering at a women's maximum-security prison, she met people who suffered extensively yet still showed a tremendous capacity for joy. Talking with these women, many of whom had struggled with addiction and suicidal thoughts themselves, she realized: "Joy doesn't obliterate grief. . . . Instead, joy has a mysterious capacity to be felt alongside sorrow and even--sometimes most especially--in the midst of suffering."

This is the story of Angela's discovery of an authentic, grounded Christian joy. But even more, it is an invitation for others to seize upon this more resilient joy as a counteragent to the twenty-first-century epidemics of despair, addiction, and suicide--a call to action for communities that yearn to find joy and are willing to "walk together through the shadows" to find it.

The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found and Exclusion and Embrace
Exclusion and EmbraceThe Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found
  • Author

    Angela Williams Gorrell

  • Book Format

    Hardcover

  • Publisher

    Eerdmans Publishing Company

  • Published

    March 2021

  • Weight

    422g

  • Dimensions

    14.5 x 21.9 x 2.8 cm

  • ISBN

    9780802877949

  • ISBN-10

    080287794X

  • Eden Code

    5302676

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