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Life Worth Living

A Guide to What Matters Most

Author Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, Ryan McAnnally-Linz
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Hardcover
$29.00 US
Penguin Adult HC/TR | The Open Field
On sale Mar 28, 2023 | 352 Pages | 978-0-593-48930-7
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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Financial Times' "Best books of 2023 — Health & Wellness" 

"Life Worth Living is transcendent. A collection of wisdom punctuated by questions of great consequence, this is the only book you need to find your way from where you are to where you are called to be."
--Kelly Corrigan, NYT bestselling author, host of Kelly Corrigan Wonders and PBS’s Tell Me More

Based on the Yale class, a guide to defining and then creating a flourishing life, and answering one of life’s most pressing questions: how are we to live?

AN OPEN FIELD PUBLICATION FROM MARIA SHRIVER

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. This search for meaning, as Yale faculty Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz argue, is at the crux of a crisis that is facing Western culture, a crisis that, they propose, can be ameliorated by searching, in one’s own life, for the underlying truth. 

In A Life Worth Living, named after its authors’ highly sought-after undergraduate course, Volf, Croasmun, and McAnnally-Linz chart out this question, providing readers with jumping-off points, road maps, and habits of reflection for figuring out where their lives hold meaning and where things need to change.

Drawing from the major world religions and from impressively truthful and courageous secular figures, A Life Worth Living is a guide to life’s most pressing question, the one asked of all of us: How are we to live?
CONTENTS

Introduction: This Book Might Wreck Your Life xi
 
Part 1: Diving In
ONE • What’s Worth Wanting? 3
TWO • Where Are We Starting From? 18

Part 2: The Depths
THREE • Who Do We Answer To? 35
FOUR • How Does a Good Life Feel? 49
FIVE • What Should We Hope For? 62
SIX • How Should We Live? 77

Part 3: Bedrock
SEVEN • The Recipe Test 105
EIGHT • The Really Big Picture 126

Part 4: Facing the Limits
NINE • When We (Inevitably) Botch It  153
TEN • When Life Hurts . . . 172
ELEVEN •  . . . And There’s No Fixing It 187
TWELVE • When It Ends 207

Part 5: Back to the Surface
THIRTEEN • It Turns Out We Have Some Work to Do 227
FOURTEEN • Change Is Hard 241
FIFTEEN • Making It Stick 259
 
Epilogue: What Matters Most 281
Acknowledgments 285
Notes 291
Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz teach the most in-demand course in Yale College’s Humanities Program: Life Worth Living. Students describe the course as life changing, and preliminary analyses by an outside researcher show strongly significant effects of the course on students’ sense of meaning in life.

Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, and was awarded the 2002 Grawemeyer Award in Religion for Exclusion and Embrace, which was named one of the one hundred most influential religious books of the twentieth century. 

Croasmun is the director of the Life Worth Living program at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, a lecturer in humanities at Yale College, and the faith initiative director at Grace Farms Foundation. He is the author of The Emergence of Sin and Let Me Ask You a Question, as well as a coauthor with Volf of For the Life of the World: Theology That Makes a Difference.

McAnnally-Linz is the associate director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. He is a coauthor with Volf of The Home of God and Public Faith in Action, a 2016 Publishers Weekly Best Book in religion, and has written for The Washington Post’s Acts of Faith blog, Sojourners, and The Christian Century.
Miroslav Volf View titles by Miroslav Volf
Matthew Croasmun View titles by Matthew Croasmun
Ryan McAnnally-Linz View titles by Ryan McAnnally-Linz

About

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Financial Times' "Best books of 2023 — Health & Wellness" 

"Life Worth Living is transcendent. A collection of wisdom punctuated by questions of great consequence, this is the only book you need to find your way from where you are to where you are called to be."
--Kelly Corrigan, NYT bestselling author, host of Kelly Corrigan Wonders and PBS’s Tell Me More

Based on the Yale class, a guide to defining and then creating a flourishing life, and answering one of life’s most pressing questions: how are we to live?

AN OPEN FIELD PUBLICATION FROM MARIA SHRIVER

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. This search for meaning, as Yale faculty Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz argue, is at the crux of a crisis that is facing Western culture, a crisis that, they propose, can be ameliorated by searching, in one’s own life, for the underlying truth. 

In A Life Worth Living, named after its authors’ highly sought-after undergraduate course, Volf, Croasmun, and McAnnally-Linz chart out this question, providing readers with jumping-off points, road maps, and habits of reflection for figuring out where their lives hold meaning and where things need to change.

Drawing from the major world religions and from impressively truthful and courageous secular figures, A Life Worth Living is a guide to life’s most pressing question, the one asked of all of us: How are we to live?

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Introduction: This Book Might Wreck Your Life xi
 
Part 1: Diving In
ONE • What’s Worth Wanting? 3
TWO • Where Are We Starting From? 18

Part 2: The Depths
THREE • Who Do We Answer To? 35
FOUR • How Does a Good Life Feel? 49
FIVE • What Should We Hope For? 62
SIX • How Should We Live? 77

Part 3: Bedrock
SEVEN • The Recipe Test 105
EIGHT • The Really Big Picture 126

Part 4: Facing the Limits
NINE • When We (Inevitably) Botch It  153
TEN • When Life Hurts . . . 172
ELEVEN •  . . . And There’s No Fixing It 187
TWELVE • When It Ends 207

Part 5: Back to the Surface
THIRTEEN • It Turns Out We Have Some Work to Do 227
FOURTEEN • Change Is Hard 241
FIFTEEN • Making It Stick 259
 
Epilogue: What Matters Most 281
Acknowledgments 285
Notes 291

Author

Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz teach the most in-demand course in Yale College’s Humanities Program: Life Worth Living. Students describe the course as life changing, and preliminary analyses by an outside researcher show strongly significant effects of the course on students’ sense of meaning in life.

Volf is the Henry B. Wright Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School and director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, and was awarded the 2002 Grawemeyer Award in Religion for Exclusion and Embrace, which was named one of the one hundred most influential religious books of the twentieth century. 

Croasmun is the director of the Life Worth Living program at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, a lecturer in humanities at Yale College, and the faith initiative director at Grace Farms Foundation. He is the author of The Emergence of Sin and Let Me Ask You a Question, as well as a coauthor with Volf of For the Life of the World: Theology That Makes a Difference.

McAnnally-Linz is the associate director of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. He is a coauthor with Volf of The Home of God and Public Faith in Action, a 2016 Publishers Weekly Best Book in religion, and has written for The Washington Post’s Acts of Faith blog, Sojourners, and The Christian Century.
Miroslav Volf View titles by Miroslav Volf
Matthew Croasmun View titles by Matthew Croasmun
Ryan McAnnally-Linz View titles by Ryan McAnnally-Linz

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A Conversation with Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz, authors of Life Worth Living

The book is based on your popular class Life Worth Living at Yale. What do you want readers to take away from the book?   Five things stand out to us: We want readers to have a deep conviction that the question of what makes life most worth living matters and confidence that they have

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