Our Mission & Values

Creating adaptable individuals and communities through strengthening faith

Resilience can be understood as positive adaptation in the face of significant adversity. Research indicates that religious faith often helps foster such resilience, but little is known about how this works. The IFR stands at the juncture of  the academic and the practical, the scholar and the practitioner, the religious and the secular. We believe that faith and science are compatible, mutually informing one another and helping us understand human existence in different but complementary ways. 

Bridging these gaps, we seek to facilitate research, create shared understanding, build strong communities, and produce educational/training resources that will shed light on the link between faith and resilience - thus benefiting scholars, clinicians and believers alike.  We hope this will begin to create lasting intellectual and cultural change evidenced by improved lives and transformed clinical and ministerial practices.