Miroslav Volf

Miroslav Volf is the Director of Yale Center for Faith & Culture and Henry B. Wright Professor of at .

A native of , Prof. Volf has forged a theology of and non-violence in the face of the horrendous violence experienced in Croatia and in the 1990s. While he maintains active interest in many aspects of faith’s relation to culture, his primary work has focused on theological understandings of work, the church, the , violence, reconciliation and memory.

After receiving the B.A. from the Evangelical-Theological Faculty in , Croatia, Prof. Volf received his M.A. from Fuller Theological Seminary and both his Dr. theol. and Dr. theol. habil. from the University of Tubingen, . 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 country. His book Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness and Reconciliation received the 2002 Grawemeyer Award, which is given 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 as reconciliation. It offers the idea of embrace as a theological response to the problem of alienation of peoples.

Miroslav Volf’s two newest books are Free of Charge: Giving and Forgiving in a Culture Stripped of Grace (Zondervan, 2005), which was selected as the ’s Lenten Book for 2006, and The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Eerdmans, 2006). His other books include A Passion for God’s Reign: Theology, Christian Learning, and The Christian Self (Eerdmans, 1997) and After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Eerdmans, 1998). The latter is the inaugural volume in the Sacra Doctrina: for a Postmodern Age series edited by Alan G. Padgett. He is also editor, with Dorothy C. Bass, of Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life (Eerdmans, 2001). In addition, Prof. Volf has written more than 70 scholarly articles and hundreds of popular editorials and articles.

Miroslav Volf 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 well as serving as a keynote presenter for the Trinity Institutes’s 36th National Conference, The Anatomy of Reconciliation (2006).

Prior to coming to Yale, Prof. Volf taught at Fuller Seminary for a decade. He is married to Judy Gundry-Volf, a New Testament scholar and faculty member at Yale Divinity School. They have two children, Nathanael and Aaron, and live in the New Haven area. He enjoys the ocean, sailing, biking, skiing and playing soccer with his boys.