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“Having children changed the way I view the world. What are the things I’m going to fight for? What kind of legacy do I want to leave behind?” PhD programs are sometimes portrayed as an opportunity to learn and develop knowledge for its own sake, but Crystal Kang is clear: The scholarship to which she feels called is grounded in what can breathe joy and liberation into a suffering world. She’s thrilled by inquiry and eager to pursue an academic career, but existential stakes form the bedrock for that journey. “I’d love to be a professor, to write, research and teach,” she says. “But the next generation is my reason for waking up, for living into deeper forms of solidarity.”

The child of Korean immigrants, Crystal grew up in California attending Southern Baptist and Pentecostal churches. As she got older, however, she found herself drawn away from more conservative religious spaces. “Around 2014, after the killing of Trayvon Martin and rising protests, I started unpacking a lot of things about myself, about what I believe about the divine and the world,” Crystal remembers. “I started digging into ‘Who am I? Why am I here? What am I supposed to do on Earth?’ Those questions led me to Chicago, and to work in Asian American justice spaces.”

While those questions drew her away from the religious belonging of her childhood, they also deepened roots to her Korean heritage. As she begins her studies working with Dr. Anne Joh, she’smoved by a pneumatology that can bridge Christian identity and Korean conceptions of sin and freedom. “In Korean, there’s a thing called han, a word for generational trauma and grief that’s left unresolved,” she explains. “There’s been some theological work connecting han and structural sin—a way of understanding the many times Korean culture was almost erased by foreign powers.” Crystal is currently exploring how jeong—the unspoken care we hold for other humans—might we interpreted as a way to alleviate han. “Dr. Joh has a Christology about how Jesus demonstrated jeong for humanity,” Crystal notes. “Inspired by that scholarship, I hope my work can explore how communities might respond to traumatic grief and suffering through shinbaram and its celebratory, liberating joy..”

Already, she’s found that Garrett Seminary is a fertile place to explore these questions. “I applied to Garrett because I knew I would have a lot of freedom to form my own study,” Crystal confesses. “No question is off limits.” But it’s not only the academic liberty that stimulates her curiosity—it’s also classmates who bring their cultural particularities into conversation with her own. “I was in a theological anthropology class, and I remember looking around and realizing that more than half of my classmates were international students,” she says. “We talked a lot about how race informs and shapes the unjust systems we have in this country. Then I remember one East Asian student saying, ‘Where I come from is very racially homogenous, so we don’t talk as much about race, but xenophobia shapes systems in similar ways.’” Other students shared how caste was a more salient factor in their homelands—still others pointed to yet different forces that structure human hierarchies. “It was so helpful to hear what oppression looks like in their contexts,” Crystal says, “how the same harmful logic can live through different frameworks.”

Crystal believes this wealth of perspectives does more than just improve personal understanding—it’s a potent resource for social change. “People have this idea that religion is irrelevant, but religion and church intersect every sphere of society,” she observes. “Not to say we have all the answers, but I really admire the ways in which Garrett tries to cultivate thinkers, scholars, and ministers who respond to a suffering world.”