Also of Interest to Professors from Brazos Press
The Cost of Ambition How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse Miroslav Volf THEOLOGY FOR THE LIFE OF THE WORLD Many people believe that ambition, understood as striving to be better than others, improves us as individuals and advances soci- ety. But what if the opposite is true? In The Cost of Ambition , bestselling author and theologian Miroslav Volf argues that striving for superiority actually makes us worse. Working his way backward in time, Volf explores what three influ - ential thinkers—Søren Kierkegaard, John Milton, and the apostle Paul—say about the cost of ambition. He also explores what the teachings of Jesus and the stories in Genesis say on the matter. Volf explains that striving to be better than others, though widely accepted as part of modern life, devalues our achievements, things that surround us, and relationships because it makes them into mere means to an empty goal. He reveals ambition’s negative con- sequences in all domains of life, showing that it is at odds with the key convictions of Christian faith. After unpacking the toxicity of ambition, Volf uses contemporary examples to guide readers to a better goal: striving for excellence. This book will appeal to professors and students of theology and intellectually engaged pastors and Christian readers. “Scholarly but readable, and combining moral clarity with compassion, this book is essential on a defining temptation of our times.” —Elizabeth Oldfield, author of Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times; host of The Sacred podcast FROM THE BOOK A sense of inferiority fuels striving for superiority, and striving for superiority is shadowed by feelings of both pride and inferiority. We oscillate between “I am better than some, maybe even most!” and “Everybody is better than me—or at least everyone who matters.” Behind the oscillation is an unstated conviction: “I must be at least better than most—beyond average—or I am inadequate, a loser, nothing.” And still further back behind that conviction is yet anoth- er: “My worth derives from how I stack up against others; I am how I stack up against others.” I hope to show that it is possible to break out of the self-reinforc- ing oscillation between the sense of inferiority and striving for superiority, wrest our self-worth from captivity to comparisons with others, and live confidently, out of a well of living water at the bedrock of our souls, undaunted by how we stack up against others. If we do, for each of us and all of us together, a new world will dawn.
MAY 2025 • 208 pp. • cloth • $24.99 • 9781587434815
Miroslav Volf (DrTheol, University of Tübingen) is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and founding director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. He has written or edited more than two dozen books, including the New York Times bestseller Life Worth Living , A Public Faith , Public Faith in Action , and Exclusion and Embrace (winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Religion and selected as among the 100 best religious books of the twentieth century by Christianity Today ). Educated in his native Croatia, the United States, and Germany, Volf regularly lectures around the world.
ALSO BY THE AUTHOR THE HOME OF GOD 9781587434792 • $32.99c
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