Faith resilience: everyday experiences

Abstract

The concept of resilience continues to be popular within various discourses and disciplines across the social and natural sciences, and has also been adopted politically and in policy. The concept’s extended and widening usage in ever-increasing contexts creates further complexities and contestation on what construes resilience. Generally, in these conceptualisations, resilience is a positive outcome following significant crisis and disaster at an extreme scale. However, such definitions and constructs ignore that resilience manifests itself in subtler and more mundane ways in people’s daily life and daily activities. This article explores how resilience is built into everyday life and how faith is used as a tool of resilience by individuals from diverse communities in their daily experiences in the city of Birmingham. This article contributes to the resilience literature by exposing examples of resilience as narrated during our in-depth interviews with participants (comprised of members from various new and established migrant ethnic communities), with particular attention given to faith as a form of resilience. This article argues that resilience manifests itself in the day-to-day experiences and practices of individuals and that faith can play an important role in individuals’ lives in overcoming and coping with the challenges of their daily stressors.