This session examines how Christian spirituality responds to the realities of suffering, constraint, and the longing for liberation. It considers how spiritual practices shape understandings of freedom, cultivate resilience, and sustain hope within contexts of personal, communal, and systemic struggle. The papers invite reflection on the transformative possibilities of faith when it is lived in tension with the injustices and complexities of political and social life.
This paper explores Watchman Nee’s (1903–1972) martyrdom as an expression of steadfast faith and spiritual freedom under Maoist oppression, employing a comparative and interdisciplinary approach that bridges Christian and Jewish martyrdom traditions. As a church leader in China, Nee endured twenty years of imprisonment, ultimately dying in a labor camp for refusing to renounce his faith. His spirituality—rooted in prayer, biblical meditation, and “limited obedience”—offers a model of nonviolent resistance.
Drawing from Nee’s writings, prison letters, and his cellmate’s testimonies, this study examines his theology of martyrdom as active participation in Christ’s suffering (Imitatio Christi). Nee’s vision parallels Kiddush Hashem (sanctifying God’s name through martyrdom) in Jewish tradition and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology of costly grace. His resistance redefines suffering as testimony and martyrdom as spiritual freedom. This study enriches global spirituality by illustrating how a martyrdom mindset sustains faith, fosters communal resilience, and transcends boundaries in persecution.
Humor has long been used as a nonviolent tool in resisting oppression and fighting for freedom. This paper explores how humor can also serve as a liberating Christian spiritual practice, examining the work of Desmond Tutu and his collaborators both in struggling against apartheid and, more recently, in promoting an interfaith spirituality of joy. The first speaker, who worked against apartheid in South Africa, will analyze how activists like Tutu and Allan Boesak used humor to express and pursue freedom, both external and internal, despite hardship and suffering. The second speaker will consider humor as a spiritual practice in a wider, global context, particularly as shown in Tutu’s later interfaith work with the Dalai Lama and Douglas Abrams. Through Tutu’s collaborative work, humor emerges not just as a tool for political resistance, but as a spiritual practice that can sustain joy, freedom, and communal flourishing.
This paper builds on a research project with New-England based congregations to explore the role of rest and Sabbath-keeping in vocations to racial justice and repair. Since 2018, several congregations with the project have identified racial justice as a primary vocation, embodying this calling through various initiatives, including learning about racial oppression, examining ecclesial histories and problematic theologies, participating in racial equity trainings, and making financial reparations. At the same time, congregations underscore the importance of rest, both in sustaining racial justice work and as a means of reparation. Drawing on interviews and congregation-authored materials, this paper considers the vital role of rest in pursuing callings to racial justice. It begins by briefly contextualizing congregations’ racial justice journeys. It then presents key ways congregations are practicing rest as a means of renewal, resistance, and repair. It concludes by reflecting on the significance of rest in spiritualities of repair and reparation.
This paper explores how fifteenth-century Castilian mystic Teresa de Cartagena understands the Eucharist as a sacrifice of asceticism and abundance. As a nun in the sonically-fluent liturgical context of a Cistercian convent, she wrote Grove of the Infirm, which outlines her theology of suffering via her experience of deafness. In conversation with scholars of medieval theology and the Eucharist, this paper will: 1) examine Teresa’s theological deployment of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb and the Lukan Great Feast, and 2) demonstrate how this sacramentality argues for a transformation of creaturely consumption. In an era when our excessive consumption impinges on the flourishing of creaturely life, Teresa understands sacrifice as both costly and nourishing; as profoundly ascetic and feastly. Ultimately, this essay proposes that Teresa’s Eucharistic imagination lends an important framework for participating in the asceticism and abundance of Christ's sacrifice, which compels communion with God and with one another.