Relationships and practices of friendship promote well-being, even as people and communities navigate diverse crises. Presenters within this session explore such relationships as they engage with various challenges to well-being, including existential crises, various forms of violence, and colonizing practices. Inspired by Indigenous wisdom and practice, Anne-Marie Ellithorpe advocates for the reframing of friendship as a multidimensional, multigenerational relationship. Jamie Myrose argues that presence-generation is a central activity of friendship that extends beyond the boundaries of life. Yehuda Mansell draws on dialogue within the Book of Job to highlight the importance of trauma-informed care within friendships in response to suicidal ideation. Janelle Adams examines the role of friendships in mitigating the impact of violence experienced by refugees, including the challenges of poverty, xenophobia, and discrimination. Through these diverse perspectives, this session highlights the pivotal role of relational kinship—friendship—in navigating crises, fostering resilience, and promoting personal and collective healing and flourishing.
This paper argues for the reframing of friendship as a multidimensional relationship that promotes collective as well as personal wellbeing. Ideals implied by such a reframing extend backwards and forwards in time and include the acknowledgement of kinship, including with Mother Earth. Such ideals—inspired by the wisdom and writings of Indigenous scholars and by learnings through participation in language and culture revitalization studies at an Indigenous university in Aotearoa—are perhaps best encapsulated in the terminology of civic kinship. Practices implied by such ideals include pursuing the well-being of the collective, rejecting paternalism, and promoting the honoring of treaties, as relational bridges between diverse “friendship worlds” that share common aspirations. The reframing of friendship argued for within this paper broadens and deepens the notion of civic friendship I have explored in earlier writings.
Belief in Christ’s bodily resurrection is a central doctrine of Christian faith. But what it means for Christ to be present to those whom he loved following his death as well as what this presence means for the daily life of Christians is subject to debate. This paper uses friendship as the hermeneutical key for interpreting this doctrine. Through an analysis of the works of Carter Heyward, Jules Toner, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, I argue that presence-generation (both spiritual and bodily) is a central activity of friendship that continues after death. Friendship prepares for and makes present in spirit what is hoped for someday in bodily form. Identifying presence-generation as an activity of friendship can help Christians to recognize the value of this most basic human relationship, particularly as they await bodily reunion with their lost friends through participation in Christ’s resurrection.
The human bias towards life, along with deep, well-founded theological values surrounding the source of life, the value of life, and the prohibition against taking a life, has rendered some within religious circles intolerant towards death, or at very least awkward towards those longing for their end. It is not for a lack of care but the impulse to convince each other to stay can be at cross purposes with being a tender and supportive friend. However, trauma-informed care, marked by a turning towards our friends, and not just a reaction to ideas about a desire for an exit, allowing for silence and the full gravity of their pain to be known, is preferable to frantic efforts to dissuade them from suicide. These contrasting approaches are delightfully illustrated in the Book of Job, providing an authentic view of trauma, a longing for death, and two differing responses of his friends, which taken together illustrate a meaningful path forward.
While considerations of violence in relation to refugees typically foreground the violence of forced displacement, I extend the conversation to consider the violence refugees face in the U.S. in the forms of poverty, xenophobia, and discrimination. Drawing on Celeste Watkins-Hayes’s concept of “injuries of inequality,” I explore friendships that, I argue, serve to partially mitigate the effects of such injuries. Informed by ethnographic research, I consider the ambiguities of friendship as a response to violence through three case studies. These cases feature Thang, a pastor who practices friendship with the Zo community; “Mama” Enatye, who is a friend to her Ethiopian Orthodox community and to displaced young mothers more generally; and finally, my own embodied experiences as a researcher befriended by Durga, an asylum-seeker from Pakistan. I suggest these cases reveal the necessity of more creative, institutional thinking about friendship while also exposing systemic changes needed in the U.S.