Presentation of the cross-disciplinary project

In an era marked by pandemics, climate disasters, and geopolitical instability, resilience extends far beyond physical recovery. This project investigates existential resilience; the human capacity to sustain or reconfigure meaning, values, and coherent selfhood when fundamental assumptions about life, identity, and the future are disrupted.

Moving beyond conventional psychological frameworks that emphasise coping and adaptation, the project argues that resilience is fundamentally an existential phenomenon. It explores how individuals and communities narrate their lives through adversity, draw on spiritual resources, and maintain ethical and moral orientation under conditions of profound uncertainty.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the project integrates health sciences, theology, neuroscience, and social science to examine the biological, cultural, and experiential dimensions of meaning-making in crisis. Spirituality, understood broadly as the search for meaning, purpose, and transcendence, is explored as a key resource in this process.

The project offers three core contributions: 

• A conceptual reframing of resilience as an existential capacity; 

• An interdisciplinary integration across clinical, humanistic, and neuroscientific perspectives; and 

• An empirically grounded account of how narrative and spiritual processes support human flourishing in times of crisis.