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Strengthened by the Spirit: Religion, Spirituality, and Resilience Through Adulthood and Aging

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Resilience in Aging

Abstract

Human beings endure a multitude of life events, from daily frustrations to the terror of combat. What factors determine whether people flourish or flounder in the face of adversity? Traditional approaches to this question have investigated the biological, sociological, and psychological. These discoveries have led to a greater understanding of the framework of resilience. However, another growing body of research, generated by the field of psychology of religion and spirituality, may further inform our appreciation of resilience pathways.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Although many regard the definition of “religion” to reference institutionalized doctrines and “spiritual” to mean a personal experience of the divine or sacred, there is debate about the overlapping meanings of these terms (see Zinnbauer et al. 1997; Zinnbauer and Pargament 2005) thus we will use the terms interchangeably in this review.

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Faigin, C.A., Pargament, K.I. (2011). Strengthened by the Spirit: Religion, Spirituality, and Resilience Through Adulthood and Aging. In: Resnick, B., Gwyther, L., Roberto, K. (eds) Resilience in Aging. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0232-0_11

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