Miroslav serves as Director of Yale Center for Faith & Culture and Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School.
Miroslav teaches theology at Yale University. In addition to the Yale Faith and Globalization Course that he co-teaches with former Prime Minister Tony Blair, Professor Volf leads courses on systematic theology, Luther and Schleiermacher, and contemporary conceptions of God. A native of Croatia, he has forged a theology of forgiveness and non-violence in the face of violence experienced in Croatia and Serbia in the 1990s. His research spans topics such as human work, the church, the Trinity, violence, reconciliation, gift-giving, and memory of wrongs. Miroslav has argued in many contexts for Christian faith to be seen not as an additive to help us cope with this or that problem, but as a way of life. Faith, he argues, matters in all spheres of life.
After receiving the B.A. from the Evangelical-Theological Faculty in Osijek, Croatia, Miroslav received his M.A. from Fuller Theological Seminary and both his Dr. theol. and Dr. theol. habil. from the University of Tübingen, Germany. He served as co-editor (1979-84) and then editor (1984-89) of Izvori, a Croatian Christian monthly, and he has published numerous books and articles in the U.S., Germany, and his native Croatia.
His book Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation received the 2002 Grawemeyer Award, which is awarded annually by Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and the University of Louisville. The book focuses on exclusion between groups of people and reaches back to the New Testament metaphor of salvation as reconciliation. It offers the idea of embrace as a theological response to the problem of alienation of peoples. Another of his books, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Eerdmans, 1998), is the inaugural volume in the Sacra Doctrina: Christian Theology for a Postmodern Age series edited by Alan G. Padgett. Miroslav is also editor, with Dorothy C. Bass, of Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life (Eerdmans, 2001). This is a collection of essays by 13 theologians who, from several cultural and Christian perspectives, explore the relationship between Christian theology and practice in the daily lives of believers, in the ministry of Christian communities, and as necessarily focal within Christian education. He has written more than 70 scholarly articles and hundreds of popular editorials and articles.
Most recently, Prof. Volf was the lead author of the Christian response to “A Common Word Between Us and You,” the historic open letter signed by 138 Muslim scholars, clerics, and intellectuals, released in October 2007, which identified some core common ground at the heart of the Christian and Muslim faiths (the complete text can be found online at http://www.acommonword.com). The “Yale response,” as this response to “A Common Word” has become known, was published in November 2007 as a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, signed by more than 130 prominent Christian leaders and scholars; the complete text of that document can be found at http://www .yale.edu/faith/abou-commonword.htm.
Miroslav has given many prestigious lectureships including the Dudleian Lecture, Harvard; the Chavasse Lectures, Oxford; the Waldenstroem Lectures, Stockholm; the Gray Lectures, Duke University; and the Stob Lectures, Calvin College. He has been featured on National Public Radio’s Speaking of Faith and Public Television’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, as was a keynote presenter for the Trinity Institute’s 36th National Conference, “The Anatomy of Reconciliation” (2006).
Links to Selected Books, Publications and Resources
by Miroslav Volf
The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World
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book at Amazon.com Download
excerpt (pdf)
Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped
of Grace
Book
description at Zondervan.com Buy
book at Amazon.com
“Christianity and Violence” Download (pdf)
“God at Work” Download (pdf)
“Memory, Salvation, and Perdition” Download (pdf)
“Soft Difference: Theological Reflections on the Relation Between
Church and Culture in 1 Peter”
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“A Voice of One’s Own: Public Faith in a Pluralistic World”
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