The commodification of resilience. Rediscovering the virtue of Christian hope for a troubled world

Abstract

Over the last decade, Seligman’s Positive psychology movement has underpinned an increase in government-level interest in the subjective wellbeing of populations; specifically in the potential health benefits (physical and mental), of complex cognitive-emotional states such as happiness, subjective wellbeing, and related constructs such as resilience. (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000; Diener, 2000). The focus on resilience, reflected across society, is in part fueled by an explosion in the academic resilience research literature (Bonnanno, Romero and Klein, 2015), aided and abetted by numerous articles, podcasts or similar in the less than rigorous popular media, and mirrored in a tsunami of references to resilience at every level of society and in both private and public sectors.