Books We Loved in 2025

At the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, we all have contracted a contagious and incurable condition: we love books. These are the books we loved in 2025.

Yale Center for Faith & Culture

The Cost of Ambition Wins Christianity Today Best Book Award

Miroslav Volf’s The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse has been named the Theology (Popular) category winner in Christianity Today’s 2025–2026 Book Awards. The recognition highlights the work’s clarity, moral urgency, and pastoral relevance in a cultural moment marked by pressure, comparison, and chronic striving.

Yale Center for Faith & Culture

Yale Center for Faith & Culture 2025 Partner Scholars

Introducing our first cohort of YCFC Partner Scholars: colleagues in scholarship and thought from a variety of institutions and backgrounds, whose exceptional work we want to uplift in collaboration.

Yale Center for Faith & Culture

You That Listen

Drew Collins comments on the significance of understanding in hearing Jesus, listening to Jesus, and following Jesus.

Drew Collins

The Joy of Humility

The true meaning of humility persistently drives debate, largely because we cannot agree on the word’s definition. The "correctness" of normative terms matters, and humility carries a distinctive normative weight. How we understand humility is not a matter of mere semantics. It is a pursuit of inquiry with the potential to inform—perhaps even to transform—our lives. The Joy of Humility takes up this task with a view toward the perennial question of what entails a truly flourishing life. Here, philosophers, theologians, ethicists, and psychologists work to frame the debate in such a way that the conversation can move forward.

Drew Collins

The End of Youth Ministry?

What is youth ministry actually for? And does it have a future? Andrew Root weaves together an innovative first-person fictional narrative to diagnose the challenges facing the church today and to offer a new vision for youth ministry in the 21st century.

Andrew Root

Exclusion and Embrace

If the healing word of the Gospel is to be heard today, Christian theology must find ways of speaking that address the hatred of the other. Is there any hope of embracing our enemies? Of opening the door to reconciliation?

Miroslav Volf

Always On

Angela Gorrell

The Accessorized Bible

David Dault explores biblical interpretation, moral responsibility, and catastrophic love, arguing that readers—not scripture itself—bear responsibility for how the Bible shapes ethics, community, and public life.

David Dault

Your Whole Self at Work

Sociologist Elaine Ecklund explores religion in the workplace, vocation, gender dynamics, and principled pluralism, drawing from research with Denise Daniels on faith and professional life.

Elaine Ecklund

Faith and Character in a Polarized Society

John Kasich discusses faith, character, fear, and civic life, exploring how personal belief and community action shape leadership and a life worth living amid political polarization.

John Kasich

Forgiving Our Fathers

Stan Grant reflects on Murriyang, exploring fatherhood, masculinity, forgiveness, Aboriginal identity, prayer, time, and mortality in a searching conversation about living lives worthy of our humanity.

Stan Grant