Overview
Many people believe that ambition, understood as striving to be better than others, improves us as individuals and advances our whole society. But what if the opposite is true?
In The Cost of Ambition, world-renowned theologian and award-winning author Miroslav Volf argues that striving for superiority actually makes us worse.
Working his way backward in time, Volf explores what three influential 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 of being better than someone else. He reveals ambition's negative consequences 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.
In The Cost of Ambition, world-renowned theologian and award-winning author Miroslav Volf argues that striving for superiority actually makes us worse.
Working his way backward in time, Volf explores what three influential 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 of being better than someone else. He reveals ambition's negative consequences 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.
Author
Miroslav Volf
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 in New Haven, Connecticut. 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.