Spirituality in Resilience Processes in International Contexts: An Introduction

This special issue was prompted by several converging social and scholarly trends: a perceived rise in the frequency and severity of disasters, a call for more studies of the role of spirituality in disasters, a commitment to research on non-U.S. populations, and a recognition of the need for more sophisticated understandings of resilience processes. First, there has been a sharp increase of community-level disasters in the past decade with three of the most economically devastating natural disasters occurring in the past 8 years and approximately 5,000 terrorist attacks per year occurring over the past 10 years (Aten & Boan, 2016). The recent surge in refugee populations fleeing from war-inflicted disasters has garnered daily public attention on social media and traditional news sources. The overwhelming demands of these disasters necessitate multi-level theory and interventions to mitigate, manage, and recover from their complex effects. Second, research in the psychology of spirituality and religion has boomed in the last few decades; simultaneously, studies of spirituality and trauma are on the rise. However, scholarship on resilience during disasters within the psychology of spirituality and religion lags behind other fields of research. This seems like a misstep as coping during disaster has been viewed by many as intertwined with spirituality due to its inherent meaning-making nature (Orton & O'Grady, in press; Park, 2010). Four years ago, Walker and Aten (2012) co-edited a special issue in the Journal of Psychology & Theology on trauma and spirituality. In it, they called for future research addressing disasters and spirituality: Overall, we need more collaborative research, or researchers, that are capable of bringing together the best of disaster mental health and psychology of religion researchers if we are going to more fully capture the complexity of psychology of religion and disaster phenomena. (p. 351) The current special issue is an attempt to respond to the call for more sophisticated considerations of spirituality in resilience processes during disasters. Third, although the Journal of Psychology and Theology is a U.S.-based journal, the cosmologies of those with whom its readers work is increasingly more diverse. It is no longer uncommon for practitioners to work with first- and second-generation immigrants whose nations of origin differ dramatically from that of the practitioner. Consistent with this trend is the growing recognition of the untenable assumption that Western-based theory and research is universally applicable (Arnett, 2008; Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). Finally, the special issue explicitly refers to resilience in terms of processes rather than variance. Early research on resilience focused on resilience as a trait (i.e., hardiness) to be investigated as an outcome variable. In general, the field of psychology defaults to variance-based research; however, notable scholars have pointed out that variance-based studies are seldom replicable (Maxwell, Lau, & Howard, 2015) and often fail to capture the lived experience of participants and clients (Gergen, Josselson, & Freeman, 2015). Understanding and fostering multi-level resilience across complex contexts requires exploration of processes. In response to these four needs, the 2015 call for papers for a special issue on spirituality in resilience processes across international contexts was intended to attract cross-disciplinary and multi-level investigations of resilience processes during adverse life events, or "cosmology episodes," across diverse contexts. Specifically, the call was for empirical or theoretical articles that addressed spirituality and religion in resilience processes at the individual, team, organizational, community, and/or national level with preference for manuscripts that focused on international populations. …