How can we experience joy in dark times, and what does it mean to truly love the world amidst suffering, injustice, and uncertainty? This volume, based on the Hannah Arendt Center’s 17th annual fall conference, explores joy as a complex and vital force. Drawing on philosophy, literature, the arts, and lived experience, contributors examine how joy differs from happiness, how it can foster resilience, and how it connects us to meaning beyond ourselves. Engaging with Arendt’s concept of Amor Mundi, the book offers a rigorous, timely exploration of joy as both ethical and existential practice, providing scholars and students with new insights into human flourishing and the cultivation of hope in fractured times.

How can we experience joy in dark times, and what does it mean to truly love the world amidst suffering, injustice, and uncertainty? This volume, based on the Hannah Arendt Center’s 17th annual fall conference, explores joy as a complex and vital force. Drawing on philosophy, literature, the arts, and lived experience, contributors examine how joy differs from happiness, how it can foster resilience, and how it connects us to meaning beyond ourselves. Engaging with Arendt’s concept of Amor Mundi, the book offers a rigorous, timely exploration of joy as both ethical and existential practice, providing scholars and students with new insights into human flourishing and the cultivation of hope in fractured times.

How can we experience joy in dark times, and what does it mean to truly love the world amidst suffering, injustice, and uncertainty? This volume, based on the Hannah Arendt Center’s 17th annual fall conference, explores joy as a complex and vital force. Drawing on philosophy, literature, the arts, and lived experience, contributors examine how joy differs from happiness, how it can foster resilience, and how it connects us to meaning beyond ourselves. Engaging with Arendt’s concept of Amor Mundi, the book offers a rigorous, timely exploration of joy as both ethical and existential practice, providing scholars and students with new insights into human flourishing and the cultivation of hope in fractured times.