Theologian and public intellectual Miroslav Volf is widely known for his course “Life Worth Living,” which he’s taught not just at Yale, where he’s the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and the founder and director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, but far beyond, even in a federal prison.
In that class, Volf asks a question, simple on the surface: What makes a good life? The question is inherent to the human condition, asked by people across generations, professions and social classes, and addressed by all schools of philosophy and religions. The search for meaning, Volf argues, is at the heart of a crisis in Western culture. When he took his class and turned it into a book, published in 2023, Volf said he was surprised, at first, by the “wide diversity of people who found the book really helpful,” given that it was based on a class designed for undergraduates.
“I suppose it shouldn’t have been surprising, because when we find ourselves at any significant juncture in life, we ask ourselves, What now? Where should I point the arrow of my longing? These are such important questions,” Volf told The Sunday Paper. “They are alive, deep down all of us, and wrestling with them makes our souls alive.”
A leader in international interfaith dialogues, Volf has written or edited more than two dozen books, among them Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace, which was the Archbishop of Canterbury Lenten book for 2006; Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, a winner of the 2002 Grawemeyer Award; and After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity. His research in recent years has had an increasing focus on the public dimensions and roles of faith, and he will be speaking at 2 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy, for the Week Nine Interfaith Lecture Series and its theme “All Rise: Save Us and Look Beyond.”
In his interview with The Sunday Paper, Volf reflected on a piece, by Rabbi Abraham Heschel, about death. Heschel came to something in the text, Volf said, that startled him.
“He speaks of the persons whose souls have died while their bodies continued to go on in a healthy way,” Volf said. “The image is stark, and it prompted me to ask: What does it mean for a soul to die in a well-trained, healthy body? What does it mean for my soul to be truly alive? What does it mean for me, for my humanity, to be alive? Asking why is really important in part because it can nudge us to care for our soul, for our interior life, for the beauty of our character.”
