Life Worth Living

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.