LIFE WORTH LIVING

Written in an informal, accessible style and drawing on wisdom from many philosophies across history, the book will attempt to distill and answer the deep questions more and more people are asking themselves as they quietly experience a crisis of meaning: "What kind of life would be truly worth wanting? What kind of world would be truly worth seeking? How should we live?"

Miroslav Volf is an award-winning author and Yale professor. The book will be co-written with Volf's Yale colleagues, Matthew Croasmun and Ryan McAnnally-Linz and is based on their course of the same name, which is the most popular class in Yale's Humanities Program. Students describe the course as life-changing and preliminary analyses by an outside researcher show strongly significant effects of the course on students' satisfaction with life and sense of meaning in life. This book will no doubt bring Volf to a broad, general readership.

We've acquired a vast array of technological tools to tackle almost any task imaginable, but we often don't have any idea of what is worth doing. As the authors say, "we have become experts in means, but remain amateurs in ends." A LIFE WORTH LIVING offers a path out of this conundrum, inviting readers into a vibrant conversation about how to seek genuine truth and meaning beyond the me-centered contemporary clichés of "happy and health" pursuits (ie meditating, eating healthfully, and exercising), challenging them to find that truth for themselves, and equipping them to live in light of their answers. Leading a good life is not necessarily a life well led.

The authors will explore how the road to discovering meaning can be difficult and demanding and how it will often contradict our learned expectations of happiness and ease, as illustrated through the lives of such diverse figures as Abraham Lincoln, Siddhartha Gautama, and Martin Luther King, among others, whose experiences of suffering and loss helped forge their transformative visions. A LIFE WORTH LIVING is designed to be provocative, a deep dive into the big questions of what we truly crave on a shared spiritual level, and how the search itself - bringing us into dialogue with great thinkers, teachers, and seekers of past and present - can create more satisfaction in all aspects of our lives and enable us to embrace the timeless human values that can help overcome challenging times. This book is perfect for readers of such best-selling authors as David Brooks, Anne Lamott, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.

Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. A leading religious public intellectual and author of over a dozen books, his Exclusion and Embrace won the 2002 Grawemeyer Award in Religion and was named one of the 100 most influential religious books of the 20th century by Christianity Today. Croasmun is Director of the Life Worth Living program at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, Lecturer in Humanities at Yale College, and Faith Initiative Director at Grace Farms Foundation. He is the author of The Emergence of Sin (Oxford University Press), as well as co-author with Volf of For the Life of the World: Theology that Makes a Difference (Brazos). McAnnally-Linz is Associate Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. He is co-author with Volf of Public Faith in Action (Brazos), a 2016 Publishers Weekly Best Book in religion, and has written for The Washington Post's Acts of Faith, Sojourners, and The Christian Century.