In the fast-paced nature of contemporary life, joy is often perceived as a goal to be achieved. On Feb. 1, Tish Harrison Warren asked the audience at Pomona College’s Rose Hills Theater to rethink this mindset at her talk “The Texture of Joy.” Warren, an Anglican priest, author and New York Times contributor, reflected on the complex process of defining and cultivating true joy and contentment.
The event marked the fourth installment in the 2023-2024 Joy Speaker Series, organized by the Pomona College Humanities Studio. Kevin Dettmar, director of the Humanities Studio, was inspired to invite Warren after reading her column in the New York Times.
“[I thought] that she’d bring a thoughtful and different perspective to the year-long conversation we’re trying to curate,” Dettmar said. “The ideal would be that the talk would reach both the heads and the hearts of audience members. That we’d be given some tools to think differently about joy, sure; but also that we’d feel joy, both in what Tish brings to us, but also in the sense of a community coming together.”
In her talk, Warren discussed her journey in trying to define joy for her book “Prayer in the Night”. While talking to pastors and priests about this idea, she found that they often established the experience of joy in contrast to other feelings, an approach which she found inadequate.
“Joy is not mere happiness,” Warren said. “The test of joy is if it [is] still there when you know everything else [has] kind of [gone] terrible … I just found that unsatisfying on a deep level. I’ve come to think of joy as a kind of deep connection or even communion to God and others, to community.”
She also emphasized the value of embodied experiences to truly understand what it means to be in a state of joy.
“People need a lot — far more than we realize — of the body, [like] the experiences of encounters with goodness … This is a friend’s smile; this is the sound of rain; this is the smell of incense. We need this kind of materiality to know joy,” Warren said. “The digital revolution has tried to convince us that we can easily toggle between the material and immaterial. Every minute I spend interacting digitally is a minute where I am not holistically embodied in time [and] place.”
Warren clarified that perseverance and bravery are required to be joyous and she recognized the value of connecting gratitude and joy.
“It often takes a lot of courage to try to experience joy,” Warren said. “To choose joy is to see all of existence as a gift. Gratitude gives birth to joy because gratitude teaches us to receive life itself and the moment we’re in as gifts, regardless of what lies ahead.”
Warren argued that the culture of late capitalist consumerism shuns contentment because it doesn’t promote sales. She asked the audience to reject the excuses that capitalism provides.In the quest for grounded joy, Warren reminded us to integrate the mentality of an “arduous good” into our daily lives.
“Arduous good is a good that is worth fighting for,” Warren said. “A good that inspires fear and hope and endurance in the face of adversity … For example, marriage is as arduous [of a] good as committed friendship and parenting. The best things in life can be difficult, but it’s [the] very place where joy is most often found.”
Attendee Ethan Fong PO ’25 was inspired by Warren’s talk to approach joy from a new perspective. The talk was a reminder that genuine joy is a deliberate choice that is worth fighting for.
“As college students, we’re trying to figure out what our identity rests on and it was very clear for [Warren] that she is connected to a deep source of joy that is powerful and very real for her,” Fong said. “I hope I can find that, but it requires a level of introspection that a lot of people aren’t ready for and it requires sacrifice.”
Pomona Professor of Mathematics Ami Radunskaya was particularly fascinated by the connection between joy and gratitude.
“I have this idea that gratitude makes you feel good and you say to someone else, ‘I’m so grateful’ and that makes them feel good,” Radunskaya said. “Before, I had this idea of a treadmill and now, I’m thinking it’s a feedback loop.”
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