Seeing Beyond Grief: Angela Williams Gorrell

In her recent book, The Gravity of Joy, our guest Angela Williams Gorrell invites readers on a hope-filled journey into the heart of unimaginable grief and back again. Her work invites readers to see the complex relationship between despair and joy.

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.

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.

Angela Williams Gorrell is assistant professor of practical theology at Baylor University's George W. Truett Theological Seminary and an ordained pastor in the Mennonite Church USA. She is also the author of Always On: Practicing Faith in a New Media Landscape.