The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse
Digital Logos Edition
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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.
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- Improves us as individuals and advances our whole society.
- Argues that striving for superiority actually makes us worse.
- Reveals ambition’s negative consequences in all domains of life.
- Title: The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse
- Author: Miroslav Volf
- Series: Theology for the Life of the World
- Publisher: Brazos
- Print Publication Date: 2025
- Logos Release Date: 2025
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- Subjects: Success; Ambition
- ISBNs: 9781587434815, 1587434814
- Resource ID: LLS:THCSTFMBTNSTNGMKSWS
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-05-20T20:54:17Z
Professor Volf is the founding Director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. His books include Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (1996; revised edition, 2019), winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Religion and named one of Christianity Today’s 100 most important religious books of the 20th Century; Flourishing: Why We Need Religion in a Globalized World (2016); The Home of God: A Brief Story of Everything (2022), co-authored with Ryan McAnnally-Linz; and, most recently, co-authored with Matthew Croasmun and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most (2023).
A member of the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. and the Evangelical Church in Croatia, Professor Volf has been involved in international ecumenical dialogues (for instance, with the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity) and interfaith dialogues (including the Muslim and Christian “A Common Word” initiative), as well as a participant in the Global Agenda Council on Values of the World Economic Forum. A native of Croatia, he regularly teaches and lectures in Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, and across North America. Amongst his many invited lectureships, he has given the Dudleian Lecture at Harvard University; the Chavasse Lectures at Oxford University; the Waldenstroem Lectures at Stockholm School of Theology; the Gray Lectures at Duke University; the Stob Lectures at Calvin University; and the Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham. In May 2025, he delivered the Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen, UK.
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