The Virtue Of Resilience

The Navy SEAL, humanitarian and best-selling author of The Heart and the Fist draws on ancient wisdom and personal experience to counsel readers on how to promote personal resilience and overcome obstacles through positive action. 100,000 first printing.

Resilience is the immune system of the human spirit, and this book teaches us how to cultivate it in ourselves, our families, and in our faith and civic communities.

The book offers a renewed, classic vision of the human person and the ordering of the sciences as read through the complementary and, at one level, corrective insights of empirical psychosocial studies on resilience.

Tracing some of the economic highs and lows that impacted the world in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, an introduction to the emerging field of resilience research explains how to approach disruptions in ecosystems, businesses and governments to better reinforce interdependent world systems. 40,000 first printing.

The author of the “must read” (NPR) Rage Becomes Her presents a powerful manifesto for communal resilience based on in-depth investigations into history, social science, and psychology. We are often urged to rely only on ourselves for strength, mental fortitude, and positivity. But with her distinctive “skill, wit, and sharp insight” (Laura Bates, author of Girl Up), Soraya Chemaly challenges us to adapt our thinking about how we survive in a world of sustained, overlapping crises. It is interdependence and nurturing relationships that truly sustain us, she argues. Based on comprehensive research and eye-opening examples from real-life, The Resilience Myth offers alternative visions of relational hardiness by emphasizing care for others and our environments above all.

Pastors, including clergy, need to be able to provide the right kind of circumstances, teaching and care to enable people to face crisis and come through difficulties stronger as human beings and as Christians. They also need the quality of resilience to be involved in Christian ministry. This book draws on the experience and literature of the desert as well as on resilience studies and on contemporary theology, particularly that of Rowan Williams, and applies theological understanding to the pastoral task.

In recent years, resilience has become a near ubiquitous cultural phenomenon whose influence extends into many fields of academic enquiry. Though research suggests that religion and spirituality are significant factors in engendering resilient adaptation, comparatively little biblical and theological reflection has gone into understanding this construct. This book seeks to remedy this deficiency through a breadth of reflection upon human resilience from canonical biblical and Christian theological sources. Divided into three parts, biblical scholars and theologians provide critical accounts of these perspectives, integrating biblical and theological insight with current social scientific understandings of resilience. Part 1 presents a range of biblical visions of resilience. Part 2 considers a variety of theological perspectives on resilience, drawing from figures including Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Part 3 explores the clinical and pastoral applications of such expressions of resilience. This diverse yet cohesive book sets out a new and challenging perspective of how human resilience might be re-envisioned from a Christian perspective. As a result, it will be of interest to scholars of practical and pastoral theology, biblical studies, and religion, spirituality and health. It will also be a valuable resource for chaplains, pastors, and clinicians with an interest in religion and spirituality.