The Languishing Project

In today’s social and political climate, working for social justice has become incredibly difficult: increasing political turmoil and disenfranchisement, widespread social harm, and the repression of cultural and spiritual diversity in our communities and country have created a serious threat to those who seek to create a culture of counter oppression and justice-oriented praxis. These conditions, supported and reinforced by systems of oppression and marginalization, create barriers that individuals are forced to navigate as they set out to make change in the world, obstacles that often leave such practitioners feeling demotivated, demoralized, and further disenfranchised within their communities.

The effects that such individuals experience can be understood as emotional responses to the challenges of our times. While these reactions must be validated and understood as products of our cultures of supremacy, as social justice practitioners, we also have a responsibility to learn how to work with these responses, to unpack our previous perspectives on our work and communities to find new pathways to action – if we stay stuck in our reactions to the obstacles of this work, we become entrenched in a state of indecision, inaction, and hopelessness, a condition that we label as “Languishing.”

The goal of The Languishing Project, then, is to provide practitioners with mental health, spiritual, and theological content and resources that can act as a “first response” to the emotional and spiritual harm experienced as we work to counter systems of oppression, to help individuals progress out of a state of languishing into a space of spiritual grounding and deeper resilience. Practitioners will have the opportunity to reflect on their relationship with praxis, reflect on their emotional responses and reframe their reactions to the crises of our world, and dream into a future of deep action for social justice. By transforming ourselves and our relationship to this work, we have the power to come together more faithfully and effectively to transform our world.

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