In this moment, when powerful forces are sowing division, attacking and disappearing our siblings, we are called to resilience, as individuals and as a community. Practices of resilience can take many shapes –different strokes for different folks. In this workshop, we will draw from the wisdom wells of our neighbors’ traditions—exploring the poetry of the first Buddhist nuns and the diary of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jew in Nazi occupied Amsterdam. These women model for us in 2026 a path of resilience. Their writings reveal rich inner lives. They find meaning in magnifying beauty even as they are enduring immense suffering. Join us as we work out our muscles of awareness, holding in tension the competing realities of this moment—the heartbreak and the joy, the cruelty and the beauty. In the words of Professor Hanna Reichel, author of For Such a Time as This: An Emergency Devotional, “the horror is real, but it is not the only thing that is true.”
Lynn Cooper is the Associate Director of the University Chaplaincy and Catholic Chaplain at Tufts University. She holds a Doctor of Ministry from Boston University School of Theology and an M.Div from Harvard Divinity School. Working in a multifaith chaplaincy context in higher education has been one of the great gifts of her life. At Tufts, she runs an interfaith friendship for students, faculty, and staff, facilitates the interfaith student council, and directs an intergenerational oral history that magnifies the wisdom and stories of lay folks. Lynn's first book, Embracing Our Time: The Sacrament of Interfaith Friendship, came out in May 2025 from Fortress Press.